Product Description

This attractively priced boxed set brings together four leading books on the LaTeX software system for typesetting documents, covering all you need to know about LaTeX. Because LaTeX is especially good for technical documents and is freely available for almost any computer system, it has become a lingua franca of the scientific world. The first book in the set, Guide to LaTeX, 4/e, shows you how to begin using LaTeX, and also serves as a handy reference. The next three books, whose authors have taken a lead role in the development and dissemination of LaTeX's most recent versions, are The LaTeX Companion, 2/e, The Latex Graphics Companion, 2/e, and The LaTeX Web Companion. They provide further information on tools and techniques available for more complex typesetting needs, for incorporating graphics into documents, and for publishing technical text on the Web. Whether you are new to LaTeX or want to be sure that your LaTeX library is current and complete, you will find a useful place for this set on your reference shelf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #238785 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 3328 pages

From the Back Cover


0201775913B10012001

About the Author

Frank Mittelbach is manager and technical director of the LaTeX3 Project, in which capacity he oversaw the release of LaTeX 2e and more than 15 subsequent releases of this software. In 1989 he joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS), working in a newly formed group for document processing using TeX and other tools. In his current position, he is responsible for concepts and implementation for remote monitoring and management of distributed systems and networks. Frank is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, as well as the editor of the book series in which they appear, Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.
     Frank studied mathematics and computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. His interest in the automated formatting of complex documents in general, and in LaTeX in particular, goes back to his university days and has become a major interest, perhaps a vocation, and certainly it is now his "second job." He is author or coauthor of many and varied LaTeX extension packages, such as AMS-LaTeX, doc, multicol, and NFSS: the New Font Selection Scheme. In 1990 Frank presented the paper E-TeX: Guidelines for further TeX extensions, which explained the most critical shortcomings of TeX and argued the need for its further development and for research into the many open questions of automated typesetting. This was the first time the topic of change or extension had been openly discussed within the TeX community and, after getting some early opposition, it helped to spawn several important projects, such as eTEX, Omega, and NTS. He is now interested in bringing together the fruits of these TeX extension developments to get a stable, well-maintained, and widely available successor of TeX on which a future LaTeX3 can be based.

Michel Goossens is at present responsible for scientific text processing at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion, and also is a past president of the TUG and GUTenberg TeX Users Groups.
     Michel began working at CERN after earning a Ph.D. in physics at Brussels University. At CERN, he soon realized the importance of good documentation and, since the middle 1980s, has been deeply involved with LaTeX. At the same time he has followed closely the development of other generic markup languages and was among the first users of SGML, HTML (invented at CERN), and later XML.

Sebastian Rahtz is information manager for Oxford University Computing Services. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion.
     Sebastian started life in classics, moved to archaeology, and thence to computing. During the 1980s he taught humanities and archaeological computing at Southampton University, where he also came across TeX. The infection grew strong, and he spent most of the 1990s in TeX-related matters, working latterly for Elsevier Science in production support and in LaTeX to SGML conversion. During that time he was heavily involved in the international and UK TeX Users Groups in many capacities, and worked on a variety of LaTeX packages, most notably hyperref. His allegiance today has largely moved to XML, in which capacity he is Oxford's representative on the Board of the Text Encoding Initiative, but he retains a soft spot for the funny backslash and curly bracket language.

Denis Roegel is associate professor in computer science at the University of Nancy. He has been involved in LaTeX for the past 15 years and has a special interest in technical graphics.
     Denis discovered computers in the early 1980s, and after studying mathematics and physics, he earned an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Électricité and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy. He later was a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Herbert Voß is a teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science at a German high school and a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. For the past three years, he has been heavily involved in maintaining PSTricks and using PostScript from within LaTeX.
     Herbert studied Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics in Hannover and Berlin. His first experience with a computer was in 1970 with an IBM machine and Algol60. The first text-processing program he used, in 1982, was Wordstar on a microcomputer with an 8080 chip. From this time on, he also was heavily involved in programming for various projects with Turbo Pascal. He came back to PostScript and LaTeX at the end of the 90s.

Helmut Kopka was previously a scientific staff member at the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie in Germany. He was involved in writing one of the first TeX drivers for HP LaserJet and subsequently introduced TeX and LaTeX into his institute, where it has become the standard text-processing system for scientific publications.

Patrick W. Daly is a scientific staff member at the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie in Germany. He has written formatting styles for several scientific journals and is the author of the natbib package for flexible bibliographic citations and of the custom-bib system for customizing bibliographic styles for use with BibTeX.

Customer Reviews

the ultimiate latex resources
After having collected many books on LaTeX i consider this set the best reference set of books on LaTeX. If one is serious about using LaTeX this is the initial must have set of LaTeX books

Not something you do not have available in the web
First of all... you have almost everything available in the web... but again it is nice addition on the library for quick results... sometimes easier than going around the web...

If you know how to make a google search, probably you do not need most part of those books...

Again though, I like the fact of having everything available in a book... You can take a book anywhere... but maybe not your internet connection ;)

Finally, the reason I give it 4 stars is because their index needs major improvement.

Great all-round reference
The set is wonderful quick reference! If you are LaTeX user, then its likely that you are aware of thousands of manuals spread all over the place in the LaTeX structure, and everywhere else. These book comes in extremely handy when you are busy writing up a document in LaTeX and do not want to spend hours searching through countless online/electronic manuals. I found all four books very useful. I usually go to "Guide to LaTeX" By Kopka and Daly, and if they didn't go in enough depth, then it's to The LaTeX Companion book which usually finish the job. Whenever I wanted a more specialized info on presentation/graphics, it's "The LaTeX Graphics companion" time. I do not write much Web-related materials, but the book, "The LaTeX Web Companion" has excellent section on making PDF files which I use for presentation materials.