Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An indispensable reference, but..., April 16, 2000
Leslie Lamport's second edition of the Latex manual is helpful, concise, and puts ideas first; it's a great book for the TeX beginner. All essentially topics are covered quickly, in an engaging style. However, it has two drawbacks. First, the reference section is cryptic and confusing; I recommend keeping the Latex Companion handy for detailed explanations and examples. Second, too many useful things are left unsaid. For instance, nowhere in this book is it stated that \to is a built-in abbreviation for the clumsy command \rightarrow (the arrow in A -> B); most users waste time making their own abbreviation, such as \ra. But \to is right there in the Latex source, it's simply not documented in this manual. The MakeIndex appendix explains the \index command in detail, but omits to mention the \glossary command (you'll find it in paragraph C.11.5 of the reference section, if you're desperate). The all-important business of add-on "packages", which allow endless customizations of the standard Latex styles, is dealt with in only one or two pages. And so on... The manual doesn't tell the reader that its style conventions are not obligatory. Thus, curly brackets are pervasive: to type a subscripted list of variables, the book suggests $x_{1},\ldots,x_{n}$. It takes quite a while for the beginner to realize that $x_1,\dots,x_n$ works just as well (and gives the same result). A simple explanation of what is an "input token" would save users a lot of time and trouble. Final answer? You'll need this book: it's a good book, and it's authorative, correct and concise. But if you need to know more than the basics, make sure you also have the Latex Companion.
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49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful, but not enough, January 29, 2000
LaTeX is a powerful typesetting program, and you need a book to use it (unlike Word). Lamport's book is not a bad choice, but it's not great either. It's well written and has a very good index, but it deals only with the 'defaults', that is, documents written in English following certain (sometimes stupid) formatting conventions.For instance, if you want to write in, say, Spanish or French, Lamport tells you to type \'{e} to get an accented 'e'. I later discovered through a friend that by adding \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} in the preamble, you can type accented letters normally. This is only one example. There are many useful things not covered in the book, and I find this annoying. It seems one book is not enough for LaTeX. Eventually, you'll want to modify some of the formatting conventions in LaTeX, and for that you'll have to 'hack' TeX macros or write them from scratch. Lamport contains only scant advice on this. I was annoyed to find that you can't imitate the book's style (e.g. horizontal rules in the headers) using the commands described in the book. Even LaTeX 'packages' (extensions such as the 'amsmath' style file) are of limited use. However, I must say that none of the other LaTeX books I've seen is very good. My advice is this: buy Lamport as a tutorial and reference on 'standard' LaTeX, and look for 'extra' information in the net or on your own LaTeX distribution. Even better is to ask an experienced user. As your experience grows, you'll be able to modify the TeX macros in LaTeX's source code to suit your needs.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
You'll need it, but ..., June 9, 1999
By A Customer
We TeX-heads (with apologies to Knuth that I didn't say TeXnicians) should all bow to Lamport for his LaTeX package, a masterpiece of macro programming and design. That said, while you'll need a copy of this book with its handy tear-out card as a reference, it is not the best way to learn LaTeX. For that you need "LaTeX Line by Line" by Diller. The problem here is that Lamport created the package, but he hasn't organized the material very well to explain it. I remember back when I first encountered LaTeX (circa 1987) and tried to learn it with only the first edition of this book. That was truly an excercise in futility. It's much easier to come up to speed by NOT using Lamport's book as your primer. But go ahead, buy the book. You'll need the command reference and that little fold-out card... .
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