Product Description

"The author lays a clear structure to guide the newcomer through the process...With its clear structure and the well-organized index and quick finder it may also serve the more experienced TeXie as a reference." -Zbl. für Mathematik

"First Steps in LaTeX" is for the mathematician, physicist, engineer, scientist, or technical typist who needs to quickly learn how to typeset articles containing mathematical formulas. This book will provide a quick introduction to LaTeX, including the American Mathematical Society's enhancements, so that your first article can be typeset in only a few hours. Like the author's more comprehensive text "Math into LaTeX," this concise, first-step handbook contains well-organized material enriched by practical examples, making it an indispensable guide for the novice user.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #917819 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Review
From the reviews: "The author lays a clear structure to guide the newcomer through the process of preparing a text with LaTeX…. Besides the comprehensive index at the end of the book, there is a useful Quick Finder at the beginning of the book; the reader can hardly get lost. The book fulfills the claim of the title…. With its clear structure and the well-organized index and quick finder [it] may also serve the more experienced TeXie as a reference." —Zentralblatt Math  "Fortunately, there are some excellent books for learning LaTeX. Grätzer’s book is one of these superb books. Readers who work through this book are likely to reuse it frequently as a reference while writing papers with mathematical content." —Journal of Mathematical Psychology “The book is very well organized, contains many practical examples and, undoubtedly, will become an indispensable tool for a novice who is in a hurry to write his first LaTeX paper.”—(REVUE D’ANALYSE NUMÉRIQUE ET DE THÉORIE DE L’APPROXIMATION)

Customer Reviews

Short, but concise,primer
This rather inexpensive book is an excellent introduction to LaTeX and AMSLaTeX. While the author boasts that a friend of his typeset a mathematics article in one weekend with a copy of the book manuscript--a dubious claim that could not possibly be true except for the simplest of articles--it is still a nice first book on the macro language. In a lot of ways it is like "Learning LaTeX" and has similar coverage. I like that one too. If given the choice, I'd have to pick one of these two or Diller's book to start. Diller, though longer and more comprehensive, is just as easy to understand and may be the choice for the person with needs more ambitious than producing that weekend article.

Don't buy this book...get "Math into Latex" instead
This is basically just a subset of Gratzer's larger book. Not to say this book isn't good, but it's worth spending a few extra dollars to get the complete book.

Good Start
I found LaTeX produces documents with a quality that is at least an order of magnitude greater than MS Word. This book gave me a fine start and helped in discovering that realization.