The Mata Book: A Book for Serious Programmers and Those Who Want to Be

Author: William W. Gould
ISBN: 978-1-59718-263-8
Print Edition

Comment from the Stata technical group

The Mata Book: A Book for Serious Programmers and Those Who Want to Be is the book that Stata programmers have been waiting for. Mata is a serious programming language for developing small- and large-scale projects and for adding features to Stata. What makes Mata serious is that it provides structures, classes, and pointers along with matrix capabilities. The book is serious in that it covers those advanced features, and teaches them. The reader is assumed to have programming experience, but only some programming experience. That experience could be with Stata's ado-language, or with Python, Java, C++, Fortran, or other similar languages. The book covers Mata, programming, workflow, verification, and certification. As the book says, "being serious is a matter of attitude, not current skill level or knowledge".

About the author

The author of this book is William Gould, who is the designer and original programmer of Mata and Stata, and who happens to be the president of StataCorp. He is also knowledgeable about the software development process, the other main thread of this book, having been the head of development at StataCorp for over 30 years. Gould is known for being a clear writer on technical subjects.