- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
LaTeX Beginner's Guide
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £15.70
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in LaTeX Beginner's Guide for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £15.70, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Product details
|
Product Description
Product Description
LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you.
LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Create professional-looking texts, articles, and books for Business and Science
LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Create professional-looking texts, articles, and books for Business and Science
About the Author
Stefan Kottwitz
Stefan Kottwitz studied mathematics in Jena and Hamburg. Afterwards, he worked as an IT Administrator and Communication Officer onboard cruise ships for AIDA Cruises and for Hapag-Lloyd Cruises. Following 10 years of sailing around the world, he is now employed as a Network & IT Security Engineer for AIDA Cruises, focusing on network infrastructure and security such as managing firewall systems for headquarters and fleet.
In between contracts, he worked as a freelance programmer and typography designer. For many years he has been providing LaTeX support in online forums. He became a moderator of the web forum latex community.org and of the site golatex.de. Recently, he began supporting the newly established Q&A site tex.stackexchange.com as a moderator.
He publishes ideas and news from the TeX world on his blog at texblog.net.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book covers all the basics of LaTeX and then some in thirteen chapters totaling about three hundred pages. Each chapter contains a Quiz with solutions given in the Appendix. Its starts with the usual Installation chapter with the installation detailed for Windows, not other environments. It then goes on in a logical sequence starting with formatting words, lines, paragraphs, and pages. Next are lists, tables, tabbings, and pictures (bizarrely in the same chapter as tables), cross-references, lists of references, indexes, bibliographies, maths, fonts (but not much on Unicode), long documents, hyperlinks and bookmarks to finish with a nice and useful chapter on troubleshooting, followed by online resources, answers to quizzes and an index.
The book is for beginners in LaTeX, but not for computers novices. You will need some fluency in computer lingo since many terms are not defined nor explained. But then, most people who would be aware of the existence of LaTeX and consider using it are probably somewhat computer savvy. The advantage is that the book can cover quite some ground and still remain within a reasonable number of pages. Overall I found the book to be a good introduction to LaTeX. It packs up quite a good deal of information in a relative small amount of pages and is easy to follow and well organized.
I do have a few caveats though. The book was made using InDesign CS4, not LaTeX. It would have been nice to see LaTeX in action. Furthermore, the book has very little on Unicode. The book is about LaTeX, it does not deal at all with XeTeX. It's still useful, but you need to know it. The author uses TeXWorks on Windows. As a result, if you use a Mac and/or another editor, some pages will be useless. But then, I guess you can't really expect a book dedicated to your particular environment. On the negative side, the making of the book could be improved. The reproductions of the compiled results of the code are obviously screen captures pasted in the text. But they are of a poor quality. There is also the annoying repetition of section titles like "Time For Action" or "Have a go hero." Furthermore the book oftentimes reads like a translation (the author is German).
Overall, despite these negatives, this is a good book to have in a LaTeX beginner's library and a good addition to the classics on LaTeX or to all the on line resources.
As a disclosure, I need to say that Packt asked me if I would review the book on my site (this is an excerpt of the review). I did not get paid and Packt had no say in the review. The only perk I got was a pdf copy of the book for the review.
The book is for beginners in LaTeX, but not for computers novices. You will need some fluency in computer lingo since many terms are not defined nor explained. But then, most people who would be aware of the existence of LaTeX and consider using it are probably somewhat computer savvy. The advantage is that the book can cover quite some ground and still remain within a reasonable number of pages. Overall I found the book to be a good introduction to LaTeX. It packs up quite a good deal of information in a relative small amount of pages and is easy to follow and well organized.
I do have a few caveats though. The book was made using InDesign CS4, not LaTeX. It would have been nice to see LaTeX in action. Furthermore, the book has very little on Unicode. The book is about LaTeX, it does not deal at all with XeTeX. It's still useful, but you need to know it. The author uses TeXWorks on Windows. As a result, if you use a Mac and/or another editor, some pages will be useless. But then, I guess you can't really expect a book dedicated to your particular environment. On the negative side, the making of the book could be improved. The reproductions of the compiled results of the code are obviously screen captures pasted in the text. But they are of a poor quality. There is also the annoying repetition of section titles like "Time For Action" or "Have a go hero." Furthermore the book oftentimes reads like a translation (the author is German).
Overall, despite these negatives, this is a good book to have in a LaTeX beginner's library and a good addition to the classics on LaTeX or to all the on line resources.
As a disclosure, I need to say that Packt asked me if I would review the book on my site (this is an excerpt of the review). I did not get paid and Packt had no say in the review. The only perk I got was a pdf copy of the book for the review.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book reads and has the layout of an on-line tutorial. It may just work as a tutorial for the beginner who wants to go through it from beginning to end, but is not good as a reference. Try scanning the table of contents. After the first page, many "Time for action - ..." headings obscure useful information. Look further into the preview, e.g. page 26, and you will see that examples of LaTeX output are reproduced as blurry jpeg images. All other books I have seen on TeX and LaTeX reproduce output in high quality. Overall, the layout and print quality is comparable to a printout from web pages. It was the unprofessional design, layout and print quality that made me return this book despite the potentially useful content.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The book "LaTeX Beginner's Guide" is more than a guide for LaTeX beginners. It not only gives a very complete overview to people who are new to LaTeX, but also serves as a reference book once they get more familiar with the syntax. The book provides many real world examples. They are simple at first and get more complex the further the reader advances in the book. Being always complete, they are perfect for reuse and extension, often showing the expected outcome. The book is very well structured, discussing the most important topics of LaTeX, including: document formatting and structuring, creating lists, tables and figures, referencing and cross-referencing, typesetting math formulas, troubleshooting, etc. Plenty of tips and tricks facilitate daily typesetting and help familiarize with LaTeX quickly, helping to get more out of the reader's documents. I recommend this book to anyone who has no or only little knowledge and seeks a smooth but increasingly challenging introduction to the extensive world of LaTeX.
Tom - author of Latex Matters Blog
Tom - author of Latex Matters Blog
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
