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The LaTeX Companion (Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting)
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List Price: $64.99
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Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 686.22544536
EAN: 9780201362992
ISBN: 0201362996
Label: Addison-Wesley Professional
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 1120
Publication Date: 2004-05-02
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Studio: Addison-Wesley Professional
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent reference text. Not a teaching text
Comment: This is perhaps the definitive reference book on LaTex. It's totally comprehensive. For that, it's perfect and you need one if you're going to do some serious LaTex work.
It's not so good as an instructional manual or for someone like me who wants to learn LaTex. Not enough examples and "show me" illustrations on how to achieve, for example, common typsetting and formatting layouts. Wish it had more examples of how to do the top 25 most common layout tasks.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is not a good guide for learning LaTeX
Comment: This is a compilation of many concisely written topics. I have not enjoyed the writing much, and have found examples more clearly written on many web sites.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for LaTeX beginners, great resource for experts
Comment: An up-to-date reference for experienced LaTeX users. This book does NOT contain an introduction to LaTeX. Rather, it assumes that the reader has a working LaTeX system and has written some documents before. The value of the book lies in its breadth of coverage. There is a solution for just about any LaTeX problem I can think of. Mostly, the solutions consist of a recommendation for some third-party LaTeX package (style file) and a short review of its use. But the book also covers some quite esoteric issues in-depth. For example, it contains the only introduction to BiBTeX style file programming that I'm aware of.
An indispensable resource for serious LaTeX writing for those with high standards for their typesetting.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Latex Book to Buy
Comment: If you are going to buy one book on latex this is the one. It covers all the basics of document typesetting with latex. I actually own the first edition of the book but of course, you should always get the latest one. In the book there are sections to cover the following topics:
- Setting-up single or multi-column layouts
- Typesetting basic headings and text
- Creating tables using either the "tabular" or the "array" packages
- How to have tables span multiple pages
- Working with floating figures
- How to typeset beautiful math formulas
- Handling accented characters
- Basic pictures and graphics import
- Installing new fonts
- Creating indexes
- Adding tables of contents and tables of figures
- Adding good looking bibliographies with Bibtex
Lots of material is covered. Though there is overlap I also think that the book by Leslie Lamport is a good complement to this book. Leslies book is shorter, more to the point and perhaps a better introduction to latex than this one. But on the down side it covers less material. This is why I consider this book to be the one to get if you get only one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This book is my Bible.
Comment: The Latex Companion is my Bible. I am currently writing my PhD thesis in Latex and I always keep this book within easy reach of my desk. However, be warned, this book is not suitable for beginners. The Latex Companion is a reference manual for people who already have an idea of how to use Latex. When I started to use Latex I tried to read this book and I couldn't. Instead, I used a paper (available on the internet) called "The Not So Short Introduction to Latex" to teach myself the basics. Nevertheless, once past the basics, I found this book to be invaluable. It provides detailed descriptions and examples of all of the most commonly used Latex packages, divided into the following chapters:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Structure of a Latex Document (including headings, chapter titles and tables of contents)
Chapter 3: Basic Formatting Tools (paragraphing, footnotes and lists)
Chapter 4: The Layout of the Page
Chapter 5: Tabular Material
Chapter 6: Mastering Floats
Chapter 7: Fonts and Encodings
Chapter 8: Higher Mathematics
Chapter 9: Latex in a Multilingual Environment
Chapter 10: Graphics Generation and Manipulation
Chapter 11: Index Generation
Chapter 12: Managing Citations
Chapter 13: Bibliography Generation
Chapter 14: Latex Package Documentation Tools
This book also contains an accompanying CD-Rom with all of the examples from the book, but I have never used this CD. I find it easier to just copy the examples myself from the text.
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