Customer Reviews

More Math Into LaTeX, 4th Edition

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I was a graduate student in math and faced the daunting task of typing my thesis. It was bad enough that I was inexperienced in writing math, but I was also a novice in LaTeX.

I tried two well-known books. In one, there is a Part I, Basics. This is for me, I thought. Unfortunately, it is 200 pages long and does not cover such elementary topics as the "cases" structure. For that, I had to go to page 288. The other book had "cases" hidden on page 238, under the title "Matrix like environments". Not very helpful.

What a relief it was when I came across this book. It helped me set up LaTeX on my Dell notebook (why do other books assume that you already have a LaTeX installation?). Then I downloaded the sample files as instructed and read the really easy 60 page Part I (Short Course). I worked through the text and examples in less than a day. Then I started writing my thesis.

In my spare time, I gave the rest of the book a cursory reading. Occasionally, I need to go beyond what is covered in the Short Course. For instance, as an analyst, I need complicated integrals not covered in Part I. (They are easy to find: in Part II, in the chapter on typing math.) And when the time came to give a presentation on my thesis, I went beyond the Short Course's section on presentations to Chapter 14, and I used Beamer!

Everybody was impressed.

Now I am Jim Whitby Ph.D. Thank you George for the help.

If you are a beginner, this is the your book.

What new can I write about a book that is in its fourth edition, and has served the LaTeX community for almost two decades?

There is a new chapter on presentations and an appendix on installing LaTeX on a PC and on a Mac, so you get help from the get go. Also, for the first time, this book merges TeX, LaTeX, and the AMS packages into one, smoothing the learning curve for beginner and advanced user alike.

If you are new to this book, I should start by pointing out that you get two for the price of one. A sixty page Short Course gets you ready to type your first article in an afternoon or two. The plentiful sample files help you get started fast.

The rest of the book presents a detailed survey of LaTeX: how to type text and math, document structure, presentations, customization, and long documents.

Gratzer teaches by example: each new concept is introduced with examples and sample documents, so you learn by doing.

Multiline math formulas is the most difficult topic of LaTeX. This is the only LaTeX book that dedicates 40 pages to this topic, trying to make it accessible with a Visual Guide and a verbal guide of how these multiline structures can be classified and understood.

Gratzer teaches by distilling the most important information you need. For instance, Beamer, the presentation class he presents, has hundreds of commands and its documentation runs to hundreds of pages. The Beamer chapter selects twenty commands, so you should be on your way writing your first presentation in hours not weeks.

This book has served me well when I started, and it is my constant companion, placed next to my computer when I type LaTeX.

I am a LaTeX programmer and instructor. This weekend, I finally had time to read Part I of this book, Short Course, and paged through the other parts.

What a pleasure! Grätzer has an amazing talent to say exactly what is important, without putting in extras that will distract a reader.

You'd think that by this time I'd know enough LaTeX to, at least, get through the Short Course without learning anything new; but instead I ran into trick after trick that I didn't know. I use Beamer but I didn't know FoilTeX, the presentation package used in the Short Course. It's a great idea to let tell users very early on how to make a presentation from their papers, and then leave Beamer for full treatment later.

I very much like Appendix A, holding the reader's hand as LaTeX is installed. Then the three "productivity tools" are introduced, explaining how to use these tools on both platforms, and leaving the rest of the user interface for later, leisurely exploration, making it really quick for users to start using LaTeX.

Very early in the introduction, Grätzer talks about "the three layers" (TeX, LaTeX, and the AMS packages) and, from the beginning, use all three seamlessly. This is a radical new idea. It will substantially reduce the learning curve -- my students will appreciate it. The wonderful foreword by Rainer Schöpf (one of the two lead programmers of AMS-LaTeX) makes the role of the AMS packages clear in the historical development of modern LaTeX.

I really like the way you got to "Lines too wide" so early in the Short Course, explaining to the user the cause of the problem and solutions. Why do most books postpone this?

I better not go on and on. Just wanted to write these few lines about my enjoyment as I read this wonderful material.

I've been using Gratzer's LaTeX books for more than 10 years. My big problem: how to introduce LaTeX to my students?

Gratzer's book has always excelled by taking the beginner by hand and introducing LaTeX in a gentle way in Part I of his book, Short Course. This part (as a pdf file) is also available as a free download

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/Math_into_LaTeX-4/

(along with sample files). For this new edition, the expanded Short Course even includes installation instructions for Windows and Mac users and a brief glimpse on how to convert a paper to a presentation.

But learning from any book is not nearly as good as sitting next to a teacher, who introduces the topic with patience and with examples. I would do it this way, if I had the time to sit with all my students individually and personally to instruct them.

Now I read it in the The PracTeX Journal that Gratzer has volunteered to do this for all my students! He produced a series of video lectures discussing the material in the Short Course (available, free of charge, at the Web site referenced above). My students now sit down, listen to a lecture, read up on it in the Short Course, then go to the next lecture. The Short Course is searchable, so if they forget where they heard a topic introduced, they just search for it (or look it up in the Index).

Most students finish the lectures and the Short Course in an afternoon or two, and then they are ready to start typing assignments for my course.

Try it. It won't cost you a penny.

John Barsby

The title might mislead you into thinking that this book is an advanced treatise on the more obscure aspects of mathematical typesetting. It's not. Instead, this fine book serves as a comprehensive introduction to LaTeX, the most popular dialect of TeX, for those who've never used it before. If you're already familiar with TeX, then you can skip the first chapter and dive right into tutorials that are chock-full of useful nuggets.

There are woefully few up-to-date books for those of us (academics, mostly) learning TeX in the 21st century. There are plenty of websites, to be sure, but some of us still crave the ease and reliability of a solid paper reference. This is the only book on TeX that you will ever need.

If you write Latex documents with lots of mathematics, this is THE book to have. I must have 5 or 6 books on Latex, but Gratzer's book is by far the most useful. It is clear, complete, with plenty of examples. It covers everything an author needs (article, book, report, bibtex, indexes,...) including the AMS packages, which are essential for math intensive documents. This may be the last Latex book you will ever buy.

The book is very helpful for graduate students who are first learning LaTeX for publishing their dissertations or for submitting articles for publication. It is especially helpful for users of LaTeX that are using pre-made style guides. This book is not for the advanced LaTeX user who is trying to create their own style guides or document class files, all though the book does have a little on the topic. The book also includes a chapter on using LaTeX for making power-point type presentations, which is helpful in math and statistics where presentations have to include equations. Power-point does not handle equations well. The statistics department at my university recommends the book to all our graduate students for writing their dissertation. I have also contacted the author of the book for additional assistance and found him to be very willing to help with LaTeX problems outside the realm of the book. He helped our department create a document class file for publishing dissertations, a more complicated procedure in LaTeX than the typical LaTeX user will have to encounter. This book is a good introduction into the world of LaTeX.

This is a useful book for people who want to type-set mathematics papers and books without graphics and pictures. For those who want to include graphics and pictures, this is not the book. The section on hyperref (links to files, URL, bookmarks) is weak. The suggested package has limitations which the author did not mention except to say that "if none of these work, you are out of luck." The new chapter on presentation with baby beamer is a good addition. It is certainly easier to follow than the full-version of Beamer user's guide, which is available on-line. The book does have an excellent index, which makes finding specific topics easy. The appendix on installation of LaTex and other supporting packages is written in a style for beginners, who will surely appreciate it.

I have been using WordPerfect for many years to write papers full of complicated equations. However, I was required by a publisher to start writing in Latex, which I had never used. Grätzer's book got me up to speed within a few days. I'm now halfway proficient in Latex, but his book remains at my side for reference when I need a see how to compose some new bit of math I haven't used before. This is one of those rare books that are exactly, 100% what I needed to learn a somewhat complicated topic, and I just can't find anything to criticize. I highly recommend it to the new Latex user and to users who need a reference where they can see how to compose a particular bit to math.

BTW, I am now converting many of my old WordPerfect documents into Latex. For that I first use the WP to Latex shareware converter put out by J. Fojtik. It isn't perfect, but it gets the process started. I then clean up the resulting *.tex file as needed using PCTeX software, which I find very convenient for debugging, importing figures, and such.

Learning to write mathematical proofs can be challenging enough, let alone trying to learn a new processor. More Math Into Latex allowed me to focus on my studies while making it easy to produce professional quality papers. I will keep this book on my desk to use for reference. It is a must for any mathematician!