Latex Books

My copy of this book is well worn, dog earned, and filled with enough paper clips to set off airport alarms. It has well over half a pad of pink post it notes extending from its pages. Several Xerox copies of book pages hang from my desk for quick reference. I would never go back to L*****'s book!

It was Diller's manuscript that allowed me to publish my dissertation with LaTeX in a timely fashion with minimal headache (from text processing!).

Pure TeX geeks will shun this book. It's too readable and too practical. If you want to hack away your grad school days solving Knuth's TeX programming exercises, this book is not for you.

Purchase this book if you actually want to get some productive work done with LaTeX!

This book is well written and is great for anyone trying to put together reports and simple documents with no frills (base fonts and formatting). It does not cover font selection (NFSS), customization, and many other important things for advanced documents, like a book. If you need a much more comprehensive book for LaTeX I would recommend Kopka's book. The book is structured in a very confusing and sometimes illogical manner, but it covers much more. This book is much more efficient, but you may find yourself needing more.

I've recently been through most of the beginning to intermediate LaTeX books and have found the bulk of them almost worthless in helping to learn and use LaTeX. This book is extremely readable and useful with correct syntax. The focus is unapologetically LaTeX2e and is not encumbered with outdated 2.09 commands. This is hands down the one book I would buy if I were only going to buy one. After this I would recommend Kopka, though that is much less well presented but definitely the next best (it is loaded with superfluous 2.09 command comparisons which just get in the way of getting through the book). It is way down hill after that, including Lamport's book (beautifully typeset but not clearly written).

In the TeX/LaTeX universe, I've found that you get the program for free, but then you wind up buying $200 worth of books to learn the program because no one textbook is all things to all people. This is hands down the best "introductory book." It's easy to read and gives you enough information to start up quickly. Hahn's book is outdated with its coverage of Latex 2.09, and Kopka's, while having lots of good stuff in it (if you can find it), reads like a scientific text translated from a foreign language--which it is.

If you want to start getting productive with LaTeX immediately, get this book.

I agree with the previous review. Among other nice touches the book contains a descriptive list of all LaTeX commands. This alone made it worth the money for me.

The book 'more math into Latex' is a good tool which helps somebody without experience in Latex to start using it as soon as possible and reach an adequate level for simple enough articles very fast. I would not be able to judge this book for difficult Latex applications.

The book is very helpful for graduate students who are first learning LaTeX for publishing their dissertations or for submitting articles for publication. It is especially helpful for users of LaTeX that are using pre-made style guides. This book is not for the advanced LaTeX user who is trying to create their own style guides or document class files, all though the book does have a little on the topic. The book also includes a chapter on using LaTeX for making power-point type presentations, which is helpful in math and statistics where presentations have to include equations. Power-point does not handle equations well. The statistics department at my university recommends the book to all our graduate students for writing their dissertation. I have also contacted the author of the book for additional assistance and found him to be very willing to help with LaTeX problems outside the realm of the book. He helped our department create a document class file for publishing dissertations, a more complicated procedure in LaTeX than the typical LaTeX user will have to encounter. This book is a good introduction into the world of LaTeX.

What new can I write about a book that is in its fourth edition, and has served the LaTeX community for almost two decades?

There is a new chapter on presentations and an appendix on installing LaTeX on a PC and on a Mac, so you get help from the get go. Also, for the first time, this book merges TeX, LaTeX, and the AMS packages into one, smoothing the learning curve for beginner and advanced user alike.

If you are new to this book, I should start by pointing out that you get two for the price of one. A sixty page Short Course gets you ready to type your first article in an afternoon or two. The plentiful sample files help you get started fast.

The rest of the book presents a detailed survey of LaTeX: how to type text and math, document structure, presentations, customization, and long documents.

Gratzer teaches by example: each new concept is introduced with examples and sample documents, so you learn by doing.

Multiline math formulas is the most difficult topic of LaTeX. This is the only LaTeX book that dedicates 40 pages to this topic, trying to make it accessible with a Visual Guide and a verbal guide of how these multiline structures can be classified and understood.

Gratzer teaches by distilling the most important information you need. For instance, Beamer, the presentation class he presents, has hundreds of commands and its documentation runs to hundreds of pages. The Beamer chapter selects twenty commands, so you should be on your way writing your first presentation in hours not weeks.

This book has served me well when I started, and it is my constant companion, placed next to my computer when I type LaTeX.

I am a LaTeX programmer and instructor. This weekend, I finally had time to read Part I of this book, Short Course, and paged through the other parts.

What a pleasure! Grätzer has an amazing talent to say exactly what is important, without putting in extras that will distract a reader.

You'd think that by this time I'd know enough LaTeX to, at least, get through the Short Course without learning anything new; but instead I ran into trick after trick that I didn't know. I use Beamer but I didn't know FoilTeX, the presentation package used in the Short Course. It's a great idea to let tell users very early on how to make a presentation from their papers, and then leave Beamer for full treatment later.

I very much like Appendix A, holding the reader's hand as LaTeX is installed. Then the three "productivity tools" are introduced, explaining how to use these tools on both platforms, and leaving the rest of the user interface for later, leisurely exploration, making it really quick for users to start using LaTeX.

Very early in the introduction, Grätzer talks about "the three layers" (TeX, LaTeX, and the AMS packages) and, from the beginning, use all three seamlessly. This is a radical new idea. It will substantially reduce the learning curve -- my students will appreciate it. The wonderful foreword by Rainer Schöpf (one of the two lead programmers of AMS-LaTeX) makes the role of the AMS packages clear in the historical development of modern LaTeX.

I really like the way you got to "Lines too wide" so early in the Short Course, explaining to the user the cause of the problem and solutions. Why do most books postpone this?

I better not go on and on. Just wanted to write these few lines about my enjoyment as I read this wonderful material.

I was a graduate student in math and faced the daunting task of typing my thesis. It was bad enough that I was inexperienced in writing math, but I was also a novice in LaTeX.

I tried two well-known books. In one, there is a Part I, Basics. This is for me, I thought. Unfortunately, it is 200 pages long and does not cover such elementary topics as the "cases" structure. For that, I had to go to page 288. The other book had "cases" hidden on page 238, under the title "Matrix like environments". Not very helpful.

What a relief it was when I came across this book. It helped me set up LaTeX on my Dell notebook (why do other books assume that you already have a LaTeX installation?). Then I downloaded the sample files as instructed and read the really easy 60 page Part I (Short Course). I worked through the text and examples in less than a day. Then I started writing my thesis.

In my spare time, I gave the rest of the book a cursory reading. Occasionally, I need to go beyond what is covered in the Short Course. For instance, as an analyst, I need complicated integrals not covered in Part I. (They are easy to find: in Part II, in the chapter on typing math.) And when the time came to give a presentation on my thesis, I went beyond the Short Course's section on presentations to Chapter 14, and I used Beamer!

Everybody was impressed.

Now I am Jim Whitby Ph.D. Thank you George for the help.

If you are a beginner, this is the your book.

Lots of details on how to tweak LaTeX.

This book is where I first look if I have a Latex problem - extremely useful.

A concise yet complete reference book for every Latexer. Very organized. a best-buy

I bought this book in 1996 when I entered graduate school and have utilised it as a reference while writing all my research papers as well as my dissertation. I also have "The LaTeX Companion" by Goossens et al., but this book is much more useful to me. At about 170 pages, it crams everything you need into a very short amount of space, including info on fonts, tables, math, formatting, etc. The chapter on large documents was invaluable to me when I was preparing my dissertation. Furthermore, the last chapter has a number of cool macros that have come in pretty handy.

Note that this is not a beginner's book on LaTeX, nor does it exhaustively show all the extremely cool bells and whistles that LaTeX can do; this book serves as a concise reference and list of hints and tips for using the key markups. When I write a paper, I like to concentrate on the actual content I'm writing about rather than how to format the text. However, when I do need to format text just right, I turn to this book, and it has never let me down.

This is an excellent book about making your own oven to cure foam-latex prosthetics. I'm just getting into this fascinating hobby, and this book helped me a lot. It is still available on the internet, just do a google search. Making the oven is relatively easy with the help of this book, but making the molds to make the prosthetics is another story. This book doesn't cover mold making at all, so you will need another reference for that.

I was amazed to see it listed on Amazon. The content of this book is so specialized it has only been offered through retailers in NY and LA, where the majority of special effects work is done.

If you know what foam latex prosthetics are, then you know you need an oven to cure the foam pieces. This book allows you to build your own oven for less than half the cost of a professionally-manufactured oven. The prices listed in the book are now 10 years old, but the major suppliers are still around (Graingers, for example) and the available materials haven't changed significantly.

The book has a few pages of 'work sheets' so you can figure out the largest mold you will want to bake, then calculate the size and power requirements of an oven that will hold that mold. You buy the heating element and insulation, build a frame, and put it together yourself. Not terribly difficult, but you'll need to know the basics of electrical wiring, how to bolt things together, etc. It's surprising how much of the necessary material can be found even in a medium-sized city.

I've thought of revising or updating the book, but basically it would just be a rewrite of the existing text plus an update on the prices. The basic content is still sound despite being over 10 years old.

gary@force-options.com

I am a family physician and I found "Latex is not my Friend" a great resource to help one's understanding of latex allergy.

This problem goes "under the radar" for doctors and patients, and this book is a handy tool to help everyone understand latex allergy.

We keep a copy in our office to loan to patients who are latex allergic.

I did not order this book from Amazon, i obtained it through some other website but i was looking for other latex information and this popped up right away, so i figured I would leave a comment about it, giving some insite.

The cover wasnt to appealing, but i took the time to read the information on it and decided to give it a shot, considering its the author's life story of her strugle with an alergic reaction to latex, and the author i would like to mention, was a pharmasist.

When i read the book, honestly i had a hard time putting it down. The story, her life was so much like mine. Same strugles with this alergic reaction to latex... it's hard. I'm tellin you, if you have or know someone that is alergic to latex... buy and read this book. It made me feel SO much better knowing I am not the only one who has struggled with this.

I wrote the author thanking her... so yes, i was impressed!

This is a great book; small format but full of great and powerful photos. The outfits are amazing and the models, just out of this world.

After having collected many books on LaTeX i consider this set the best reference set of books on LaTeX. If one is serious about using LaTeX this is the initial must have set of LaTeX books

This is the first and only book I read to get me started using Latex to work on my thesis. The book covers just the right amount of depth to get one started on using Latex for technical writing, without getting into other details that might put off a new user.

I have recommended this book to several others who wanted to give Latex a try, and none has not come back with positive comments.

The book's self-description suggests that Booksurge will accept a LyX generated pdf but I've not been able to get a Booksurge representative to confirm that a LyX pdf meets its specs for embedded fonts, etc.
Is this a fact that LyX pdfs can go straight to booksurge without additional adobe processing?

A photographic diary with beautiful, real looking pictures of a loving and caring relationship of the kinky kind, tastefully set into pictures taken during the couples' playtimes, nicely arranged with poems expressing the author's feelings. As the cover already says, the couple is a lot into latex and some leather, however they too have their fun with some bondage and discipline.