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Title: The LaTeX Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, Alexander Samarin ISBN: 0-201-54199-8 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 31 December, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.24 (17 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Yep, you'll need this one too.
Comment: Everyone seems to recommends this as a "second" or companion LaTeX book following the purchase of Lamport's guide. Buying these two books and trying to learn LaTeX is like trying to learn a foreign language from that language's physics texts--you'll be exasperated in no time. Anyway, this book lists many of the text massaging add-on packages to LaTeX available via download from CTAN. For that use, it's great. (Without reading this book, I probably would never have figured out that the easiest way to indent the first paragraph after the section heading is simply to use the "indentfirst" package.) You'll find a lot of packages that you'll need instantly and probably many more that you will just chuckle about as you read the commands. ("Hey, lookee here at this mini table of contents for-each-chapter package. It's probably a pain in the butt to learn... .)
You will eventually need this book even if you are a rank LaTeX novice so you might as well buy it now.
Rating: 4
Summary: not perfect, but indispensible
Comment: The bottom line is: This is the most useful book on latex2e that I own. I use it all the time. This is not a great book, but there aren't many good books on latex2e and this is probably the best or close to best there is.
There aren't good books on latex; there are very few good books on tex. People don't buy these books because they're fun or interesting, or make good reading, but because they need to get things done and they want the book to show them how. The latex companion will show you how to get things done. If you need to typeset latex documents often, probably "pure latex" in itself won't be enough for you, and the book will make you aware of this fact: It surveys some of the more useful packages for doing useful things: long tables, inserting and manipulating graphics, etc. Once you get the hang of going over to CTAN, checking for useful packages that do the stuff you need, downloading and installing them, you'll be "on your own" and will be able to progress independently. I haven't found a need for another latex manual beyond the Latex Companion, though an O'Reilly pocket reference for tex and latex would have been great! (O'Reilly: Are you reading this???) There are some subjects it doesn't treat well, like foreign languages in latex, but otherwise, it's fine. Another downside is that the book doesn't treat the issues of pdf generation, html generation and hyperlinks, which are becoming very popular in latex circles.
Get this book, and you will probably not need another latex book until the O'Reilley pocket reference to tex and latex comes out.
Rating: 3
Summary: Agree about frustrating aspects, but more depth than kopka
Comment: Yeah, the index is pretty appalling; yeah, learning LaTeX via this route was rough; nevertheless, short of trying to decipher the minimally commented LaTeX source code, it's the only place to find a wide variety of facts.
Speaking of the source code, isn't it about time that someone wrote up a nice thorough plain-English description of what exactly LaTeX contributes to TeX, and how it does it? That way there would be a way to learn everything at the highest level: read the TeXbook, then read what I envisage. At present, the vast number of `@'-commands, which you need to grasp for writing macros, aren't documented anywhere outside of the source code.
Also, does anyone know the inside scoop on the progress of NTS/LaTeX3?
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Title: LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition) by Leslie Lamport ISBN: 0201529831 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 30 June, 1994 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
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Title: The LaTeX Graphics Companion: Illustrating Documents with TeX and Postscript(R) by Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Frank Mittelbach ISBN: 0201854694 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 15 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Math Into LaTeX by George Gratzer ISBN: 0817641319 Publisher: Birkhauser Boston Pub. Date: 22 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: The LaTeX Web Companion : Integrating TeX, HTML, and XML by Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Eitan M. Gurari, Ross Moore, Robert S. Sutor ISBN: 0201433117 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 10 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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Title: Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) by Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly ISBN: 0321173856 Publisher: Pearson Education Pub. Date: 28 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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