Is there a good plain TeX tutorial that explains about doing automation and making layout?

Question

I am interested in learning plain TeX especially in

1. automation: looping, conditional branching, jumping, iterating, etc.
2. layout: creating custom smart tables and boxes that can span cross pages.

What is the most often used commands for doing those above? At least I have a rough direction to the target.

---

EDIT 1:

Reading Knuth's book needs much time. I want to be more practical and instant first. Later after grasping the rough and basic understanding, I will read the Knuth's book.

Answer 1

I know only of two:

http://mirror.ctan.org/info/texbytopic/

http://mirror.ctan.org/info/impatient/

You'll find pdf versions of the books in the directories.

Answer 2

The problem you will have here is that a lot of the basic work on plain TeX programming was reported in TUGBoat, which therefore means things are spread out. At the same time, a lot of the basics are leant from existing code, rather than from books. This applies in particular to loops, where most people use ideas from The TeXbook, etc., and adapt them. For tables, you'll be best looking at the various LaTeX packages and the ConTeXt TaBlE implementation for ideas. This reflects the fact that once something is implemented in TeX, the usual way to reuse the idea is to copy the code. It's not the same a a compiled language where you need to know about the implementation approach without the option of simply copying all of the code.

Answer 3

In addition to TeX for the Impatient, I also like looking at Don Knuth's TeX code, most of which is available on his homepage: Preprints of Recent Papers.

The CTAN plain contrib may also be useful, as well as Eplain: Expanded Plain TeX.