The LaTeX Companion (Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting),   ISBN:9780201362992

Customer Rating: 

I started using LaTex earlier this year after the Microsoft equation editor annoyed me for the last time. The great thing about LaTex is that it lets you forget about the format for a while and actually focus on the writing. No more stupid paperclips popping up to ask if you need help formatting a list! No more saving a document one day and opening it the next and for some reason all your indentation is screwy. LaTex just works!

There are definitely tons of excellent online resources for LaTex that are freely available. The nice thing about this book, however, is that besides providing simple answers for general questions, it also goes on to explain why things work the way they do in LaTex. Example code is displayed in two colors, making it much easier to read.

Another reason the book is nice is that just by flipping through it, you can find examples of things that you did not even know you could do in Latex. Each section is very detailed with example code and results. I definitely recommend keeping this book by your side when working in LaTex.

Customer Rating: 

If your trying to do anything complicated with Latex and need a reference to this is the book you need.

Customer Rating: 

This is perhaps the definitive reference book on LaTex. It's totally comprehensive. For that, it's perfect and you need one if you're going to do some serious LaTex work.

It's not so good as an instructional manual or for someone like me who wants to learn LaTex. Not enough examples and "show me" illustrations on how to achieve, for example, common typsetting and formatting layouts. Wish it had more examples of how to do the top 25 most common layout tasks.

Customer Rating: 

This is a compilation of many concisely written topics. I have not enjoyed the writing much, and have found examples more clearly written on many web sites.

Customer Rating: 

An up-to-date reference for experienced LaTeX users. This book does NOT contain an introduction to LaTeX. Rather, it assumes that the reader has a working LaTeX system and has written some documents before. The value of the book lies in its breadth of coverage. There is a solution for just about any LaTeX problem I can think of. Mostly, the solutions consist of a recommendation for some third-party LaTeX package (style file) and a short review of its use. But the book also covers some quite esoteric issues in-depth. For example, it contains the only introduction to BiBTeX style file programming that I'm aware of.

An indispensable resource for serious LaTeX writing for those with high standards for their typesetting.