LaTeX Explained

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

I bought this on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a forum thread, and I am glad I did. Some of the diagrams are dense and I had to reread a few sections, though that may just be me. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. The chapters on latex are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. Worth the money and the reading time, without hesitation.

Better than I expected. Rare to find a technical book this well judged.

I bought this on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a forum thread, and I am glad I did. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. Some of the diagrams are dense and I had to reread a few sections, though that may just be me. If you have the prerequisites, this is an easy recommendation. I will be keeping it on my desk rather than the shelf.

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The writing is direct and does not waste space on filler, which I value in a technical book. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.