Stefan KottwitzLaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition: Create visually appealing texts, articles, and books for business and science using LaTeX

This book and its author have been a great deal of help to me even though I have no pressing use for Latex. While trying out some Julia computer language sample programs, one of the plotting examples required the use of Latex (for some really nice mathematical notation!). So, Google time. (For great advice in this regard, see Dr. Kuehner's 5-star review of this book.) After a great deal of googling, I managed to install a Latex distribution, but had no luck. I found this book at Amazon and downloaded its Kindle sample. I liked what I saw and purchased the book. No regrets whatsoever. Although I haven't read every word, I have successfuly installed the recommended (huge) distribution and have gone through most of the many examples. I did pay particular attention to the chapter about writing mathematical formulas since that's what brought me to Latex.Once I felt somewhat comfortable, I branched out to trying some of the plotting examples in the various online galleries. I ran into an issue involving an external program called by Latex, googled, and landed at a forum on latex.org. Within hours, I was helped by the book's author who I have found is very knowledgeable and an active participant in several latex forums. We even exchanged emails about his "Latex Cookbook" which I would buy if I had a deeper interest in Latex. However, I will definitely be purchasing the author's upcoming book, "LATEX Graphics with TikZ" since it will be focused on graphical applications. Until then, I'll be continuing to expand my latex knowledge using the book, not Google!

Latex Beginner's Guide is great introduction for people that has had not experience with Latex before. In my case I never used Latex in the University, but after reading Stefan's book I see how to use it for electrical engineering, electronics and math documentation. It is a powerful tool to generate documents, format them , write formulas, there are even libraries to draw electronic circuits. It takes some time to get use to Latex but the book take you from the beginning so you can start creating your own documents fast.The book if full of examples to clarify the different topics, and all the examples I tested they ran without a problem. I found chapter 9 very useful, where you learn how to write formulas and generate math documents that look great.The references are great and in general the book is a easy reading. I used Debian and TeXworks to run all the examples, just make sure to have space because the full install of Latex is more than 4GB.Thank you very much Stefan for such a great book.jose

Great overview of LaTeX for beginners with a stepwise approach to building documents. I noticed a few typographical errors in the text but overall a great book.

A great amount of detail for a beginner or intermediate user of latex. I have been using latex for a year and have a copy of more math in latex. However, I wish I could have started with this book it would have saved me a few headaches. Even having some experience with latex I still find it useful.

As an introduction to Latex from “ground zero” it is very good. Book is well organized and very helpful to get you up and running.

Maybe it is just personal preference but I was not able to get what I needed from this book, and had much higher expectations. Having learned HTML and CSS markup concepts from textbooks in the '00s, I expected this to be easier to read and far more comprehensive. I found myself (and am still finding myself) struggling and searching online forums for answers to my questions.Perhaps that has more to do with LATEX than with this book? Either way, this book did not seem to reduce my misery fighting with this markup.

LaTeX Beginner's Guide is a great first book that covers installing LaTeX and creating your first document. All of the standard topics are covered: text formatting, macros, page layout, creating lists and tables, cross-references, writing math formulas, developing large documents, and troubleshooting. All these include examples that you can try and modify. LBG is a solid introduction to becoming productive with LaTeX.

Book is so so.Documentation on the LaTeX CTAN is more useful.The not so short guide by Tobias Oetiker is better structured and more useful.

Hi! LaTeX Beginner's Guide was a great read and contains enough information to get started with LaTeX, whether you are looking to write a book, paper or user manual. Thank you Stefan for writing this book and reediting it. I understand now that LaTeX books don't need to change much because the technology is stable and mature, but I can say that being a newbie the edition date of the book was a factor in my decision to start using it! Old books give the impression that the technology is outdated, which is not the case with LaTeX. Thanks again, great read and I recommend it to everyone.

Avrei preferito esprimere più avanti il mio giudizio su questo libro. Al momento non mi sembra meriti più di tre stelle, anche se è scritto per principianti.