Best LaTeX tutorials or books?

Question

I'm trying to get started with LaTeX, ready for the large amount of academic writing I will be needing to do shortly. I've come across various Internet resources on LaTeX, but some seem to be rather old, and not particularly brilliant.

What are your favourites? Is there a good LaTeX reference site which lists pretty much every command (a nice interface would be a bonus). Failing that, what books would you recommend?

Answer 1

I recommend The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. For commands, really the best thing to do is to Google "latex [command]" where [command] is the thing you want to look up. You'll get a bunch of sites like this which have huge lists of commands. I also recommend the LaTeX Wikibook, which has more information about features of LaTeX or tasks than about each command.

Another useful resource is the #latex IRC channel on Freenode (that is, when people are around).

And I don't know how much mathematics you'll be putting into your documents, but the Short Math Guide covers a lot of useful symbols and commands (if you can get it to load; the server is pretty slow, though you can find other versions via Google).

Answer 2

As a mathematician: "The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List" (PDF, 4.2 MB).

Answer 3

Here's a good guide. Pretty comprehensive.

Answer 4

There's a whole StackExchange site for TeX nowadays, dontcha know!

Answer 5

The 'short course' and reference appendices from the 1996 edition of George Gratzer's Math into Latex are on CTAN as a PDF file at http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/mil/mil.pdf. The 2007 edition (now titled More Math into Latex is available in book form.

Answer 6

The wikibook is pretty good. And for more advanced/detailed topics I've got The LaTeX Companion.

Answer 7

I found this site a while back. It has pretty much everything that a beginner would need to start with LaTeX including links to basic tutorials and some more advanced stuff you might eventually need.

I also second the LaTeX Wikibook mentioned before.

Answer 8

Among dead-tree books, I found LATEX For Everyone, by Jane Hahn, the quickest on-ramp to the expressway of math typesetting. I'm not sure it's the best reference for later on, but good for beginners. The approach is to start with a minimal document, and introduce features, very much encouraging experimentation.

Except for one tragic flaw, one that would stop noobs cold, right at the start: this book uses the antique markup "\documentstyle{article}" instead of the modern "\documentclass{article}" But a bit of Googling and a peek at other tutorials will help one get past that.