Home → General LaTeX tips and tricks → Best books

1. What are the best books about LaTeX?

Answer

There is no contest. A Guide to LaTeX: Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting, by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly (Addison Wesley, 4th Edition, ISBN: 0321173856) is truly indispensable.

The book manages to find the perfect balance between being a reference work you can quickly look things up in, and being a user manual that you can just read and learn things from.

LaTeX creator Leslie Lamport's own LaTeX: a Document Preparation System is okay, but in my opinion much better as a tutorial than as a reference manual. Use this book if you are really just getting started with LaTeX for the first time. As an introduction, it's great.

The LaTeX Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin is quite popular with many people, but I've never been able to develop a liking for it. It's a decent enough book, but the writing style somehow doesn't suit me, and it never seems to contain the information I am looking for.

In summary: get the Kopka book, even if you think you already have all the LaTeX reference material you need. I really think you will find it to be worth it.

(Note: the pictures on this page were snarfed from Amazon.co.uk.)