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Which book (free or otherwise) was the most useful to you when you started learning LaTeX?
I am frequently asked this question by friends who want to learn LaTeX, and I recommend the book which got me started, The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε, but I feel that there might be better options around.
Also see LaTeX Introductions in languages other than English.
I've used LaTeX wikibook mostly. It's a really good resource when writing mark-up which is the easiest and fastest way to learn.
Unfortunately, proper maintenance of the LaTeX Wikibook has gone astray. Quite a lot of the provided information is a bit outdated. Since it is very hard for a beginner to judge the quality of advice, maybe it's better to choose another document for now.
When the information is once again up to date, this little note will disappear again.
I used The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε and still go back to it.
(I think that all the answers should be in the answers so that it's easier for people to compare them; also, what I said is true: it is the one that I use and continually go back to.)
.tex document "must be plain ASCII text", and it teaches you how to compile it via the traditional latex - dvi - ps route. I don't think many people do these things anymore. We write our documents with utf8 encoding, and we compile it with pdflatex, xelatex or lualatex.
Grätzer's under-appreciated book is excellent, especially at showing you how to do things the "right" way:
(Earlier editions were called "Math into LaTeX"; it's not a sequel.) Especially if you're learning LaTeX for typesetting mathematics or related areas, this is a wonderful book — it includes, for example, chapters on the several AMS environments for multiline equation displays, making presentations with Beamer and other classes, and BibTeX — all things that you're likely to need at some point. Several samples from the book are available on CTAN.
[Edit: His first section, A Short Course in LaTeX, is available on CTAN and I recommend it even higher than lshort/not-so-short introduction: it's shorter, though of course less detailed. As quoted in the comment below, it's IMHO the ideal introduction to LaTeX for mathematics.]
Among actually free books, take a look at the LaTeX book on Wikibooks; its excellent quality may surprise you!
I found Kopka and Daly's Guide to LaTeX to be very helpful. It starts with the basics of what a LaTeX document is, how it's laid out, what components it can and should have, etc. and then moves on to cover technics for drawing and including figures, creating new commands and environments, and more advanced customization in case you ever need it.
Most important to me were the many examples scattered throughout, so that if you have some idea of what you're trying to do you usually don't have read an entire section but just flip through until you find an appropriate example and then try something similar.
Have a look at Stefan Kottwitz's LaTeX Beginner's Guide. It has lots of fully-explained examples and up-to-date tips.
latex. It's up to date and explains only the necessary basics, and does so very clearly. If I were to teach a course for beginners to latex, I would use this.
Also worth reading:
“LaTeX for Complete Novices” by our highly esteemed TeX.SE member Nicola Talbot.
It’s available in the WWW on http://www.dickimaw-books.com/latex/novices/, where you can get 3 PDF versions (2 different paper formats and a version for screen viewing), a HTML version and the sources.
Very recently the A4 PDF version was also added to all big TeX distributions. Therefore you can open it, as well, in your PDF viewer with texdoc dickimaw-novices (it got this name to be unique among all other documents).
I think I would suggest the book by Marc van Dongen, LaTeX and Friends, which is very up-to-date. For example, it has a long chapter on TikZ.
On Springer's web site of this book several parts may be read on line or downloaded as PDF.
The book has also been reviewed on the TeX User Group site.
Marc himself has a web site for his book: Welcome to LaTeX and Friends. There's also a short film about the book.
Ah, I remember my first steps: somehow I stumbled upon LaTeX Primer which was not only a great introductory text, but was a real beauty typography-side.
Also, another great book which hasn't been mentioned here yet (and is definitely worth mentioning) is Digital Typography using LaTeX by Apostolos Syropoulos, Antonis Tsolomitis and Nick Sofroniou. I personally call this book "the book" along with Gratzer's "the book" ;)
The Art of LaTeX is a 100-page intro to the subject with a lot of parallel "LaTeX-code : typeset-result" examples throughout the text.
A companion book, The LaTeX Math Companion, does the same with math in LaTeX.
They are filled with examples, well-formatted and cross-indexed. Written by Helin Gai, formerly of Duke University.
In practice the source I have found most useful and convenient is this LaTeX wikibook.
The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX that the question references is good, but when first learning LaTeX, I found Peter Flynn's Formatting information a very useful supplement.
For me, I find that The LateX Companion by Mittelbach and Gossens. It is very useful especially for troubleshooting purposes when compiling errors when the code gets more sophisticated. I am writing a book and subdivide into chapter by file. Chapter 1 one tex file. The master file controls the overall includes bibliography cover page,preface etc.
For one simple page really beginner stuff it is easy, you don't need this. It is when the error warnings become more abstract and you wonder what is happening and try to understand the error messages/warnings.
For an online approach to learning LaTeX, see https://www.learnlatex.org. The site is current in beta (so the design is not ready), but the core content is there. It's been developed by several 'strong' contributors to the StackExchange site, and has 'live' demos available in most of the 16 lessons, some exercises and additional support materials.
[Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind the site.]
[Screenshot from 2021-02-17]
I found this guide to be helpful when I began:
Short and very to the point with a lot of good examples.
I think that a great start is some of the above mentioned like: The Art of Problem Solving
But I think that a short introduction book to LaTeX is good and it goes by the name:
Learning LaTeX, by David F. Griffiths and Desmond J. Higham. Learning LaTeX
Very light on the beginner and quite comical throughout.
The above link references the original (1997) edition. A second edition, published in 2016, has been highlighted by a commentary by the authors.
Another great one that is free and a online pdf version would be this:
A Simplified Introduction to LaTeX
Hope this helps any.
I found Lamport's Latex: a document preparation system the best book for learning LaTeX
lshort.
I found Art of Problem Solving Wiki page on LaTeX to be a good resource. (it's themed towards learning simple syntax for texing math, which was exactly what I wanted)
Additionally, there is the useful list of LaTeX symbols.
I recommend Peter Flynn's Formatting Information to people -- it seems to have the right pace and style for many, being well-written and reasonably brisk.
Another (unusual) advantage is that it's more sympathetic towards humanities users than many introductions.
The most important is to learn by doing. Take some small piece you want to typeset and make a most simple possible document. Then start to make it more compilicated. If you want figures/plots use TikZ.
If you seriously mean your TeX/LaTeX future, the pointers in the other replies are definitely a good starting point, but already at an intermediate/advanced stage I strongly recommend the Donald Knuth's TeX book plus reading the guts of the $TEXMF/tex/latex/base/latex.ltx file, i.e., the LaTeX implementation. Takes an effort, but at least some knowledge of internal workings of plain TeX is in my opinion indispensable for typesetting non-trivial documents. One bumps to the limits LaTeX pretty quickly.
texdoc source2e will display the pdf file with the base latex code along with explanatory text.
Nov 16, 2015 at 15:51
I learn a lot by setting TeX Stack Exchange as my homepage. So every time I launch the internet, I'm triggered to look at the questions on the site. This way I've really learned a lot about the possibility's of LaTeX, and also good practice :-)
Ethan Bloch's A Brief Introduction to LaTeX for Bard Students which can be found on his homepage contains exactly enough info to get started (I started texing with it within an hour).
If this is your first document and you have no idea where to start I would recommend the section Learn in Overleaf
They have series of videos with material to work with.
Vincent Lozano - Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu savoir sur LATEX sans jamais os er le demander
Unfortunately the author is French and, as such, writes in French.
But the book is clear, very clear. You can buy it, download it, and not only the PDF... the source LaTeX also.
We created slides for a LaTeX introduction for physics students, explaining the basics, mathematics, biblatex and some typographical issues.
The (german) slides can be found here: http://toolbox.pep-dortmund.org/files/archive/latest/latex.pdf
The slide will be updated every year in september-october.
If you read French and work in humanities, I have written a beginner guide for humanities. I don't know if it's good, but many people told me it is. http://geekographie.maieul.net/Xe-LaTeX-applique-aux-sciences
These resources may be of interest as supplementary materials for independent learners or to people teaching LaTeX to others. Since they are materials prepared for workshops, they are not intended as standalone or self-sufficient materials for people learning alone. However, some of the material may be of use to people teaching themselves, if used in conjunction with one or more of the comprehensive introductions featured in other answers.
The materials are prepared for workshops taught for Cardiff University's Doctoral Academy and are updated from time-to-time. However, it seems impossible to edit an Overleaf project once published. For obvious reasons, I'd also prefer everything to be in the same place, so I hope to migrate LaTeX I to GitHub next semester.
Slides, notes and exercises adapted from UK TUG's introductory training course and prepared for an introductory postgraduate workshop:
Supplementary handouts provided include the LaTeX cheatsheet (http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/) and David Carlisle's list of maths symbols (https://ctan.org/pkg/maths-symbols).
The original UK TUG project maintained by Joseph Wright:
Slides, notes, exercises and supplementary handouts prepared for a series of four intermediate postgraduate workshops:
The workshops cover
custom macros, packages and classes;
bibliographies with BibLaTeX and Biber;
presentations with Beamer;
float management, use of functions and external data files with pgfplots and drawing with TikZ.
The notes for these workshops all include appendices featuring various kinds of additional information and topic-specific pointers to further resources. For example, the first workshop itself introduces only the core LaTeX 2e facilities for creating commands and environments, but the appendices introduce resources covering some of the more advanced options provided by TeX and expl3.
Supplementary handouts include a Biblatex/Biber cheatsheet (https://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-cheatsheet), a font sampler and annotated lists of general, discipline-specific and font package recommendations. The sampler and package lists are included in the project repository (https://github.com/cfr42/latex-2/tree/master/handouts).
If you are interested in a spanish version, you could use this one It's from the Intituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica
It has a plenty of options and comes with examples, codes and other tools additional to make some nice \TeX files.
This introductory guide to LaTeX "Learning LaTeX by Doing" seems good. It not only teaches the basics but also provides practice (which most guides seem to lack), which makes it easier to learn more complicated things later after having some experience.
\` (double backslah) is *not* an alternative to a blank line in the input. An alternative would be \par`.
Aug 11, 2015 at 18:47
You may have look at the following book. It is a concise introduction to LaTeX (70 pages). https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Latex-Chetan-Shirore/dp/1329328957