Customer Reviews

TeX for the Beginner

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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This book is an excellent book for those that want to learn to use TeX. Although the title of the book is "for the beginner", the book is true to its title, it will take someone who knows nothing about TeX, but the book does not stop at the beginner level - it shows various tricks that are not so straight-forward such as, changing fonts, making boxes, table buildings, etc.

I have read Paul Abraham's "TeX for the Impatients", as well as Arvind Borde's "Mathematical TeX by Example", but they do not compare with Wynter Snow's book.

I have also read "the" TexBook by Knuth. Although this is "the" ultimate source book for TeX, it is not a "user's manual".

Hence, I highly recommend this book for anybody who wants to use TeX.

I confess, I'm biased: I wrote the book. But I still use it myself as a reference!

This book is designed for novices, and explains not only how TeX works, but how programming languages in general work. It is clear, concise, and has lots of silly examples.

Using TeX directly gives you very powerful and flexible control over the layout of your pages. I thoroughly recommend both TeX and this book, and am happy to answer reader questions.

Wyn Snow

Remember: This is a book about TeX, not LaTeX! If it is TeX you want to work with, this book will get you started at no time at all. This is not a tex reference, and it's not the only book on tex you'll need. But it will do two good things for you:

- It will get you writing high-level tex quickly.

- It will get you to do tex the RIGHT way, so that you won't have to re-write the bulk of your tex later...

And you can write tex the right way -- right away! The right way to write tex is to treat it like a markup language, and to write plenty of macros for any kind of tagging you need. Then, later, you can play with your macros to give your document the look you want. But as long as you use tex macros to markup your document, you don't even need to know HOW to get the formatting effect you want -- you can add this later, you can get someone else to help you, etc. This book is so valuable because it will force you to write macros right from the start, and use them as markup tags, to give meaning to your document. The fancy formatting will come later, when you've mastered the language.

This has been an excellent reference book while I have been learning TeX. However, this book finds itself wanting in that there should be a complete example of a work TeX file. I had to go looking on the internet for examples of a working file. I would still recommend this book to anyone who is learning TeX as it is chocked full of great information.