Book Review November 2023

LaTeX – A Document Preparation System
User’s Guide and Reference Manual

Lamport, Leslie
2000, Boston [u.a.]: Addison-Wesley, 2. ed., 272 pages
ISBN-0-201-52983-1
Signature in Golm (IKMZ): ST 351 TEXL LAM

LaTeX supports clearly and uniformly formatted documents from the ground up, which is often a prerequisite for scientifically oriented work. In contrast to other word processing applications, LaTeX is less inclined to encourage the creation of unformatted layouts and unstructured documents.

If you are interested in learning LaTeX, then “LaTeX – A Document Preparation System: User’s Guide and Reference Manual” by Leslie Lamport is the book you need. Even for LaTeX beginners who do not want to delve deeply into the technical details, this book, in conjunction with the extensive LaTeX documentation, is sufficient to use the system comfortably.

Lamport’s book is not only informative but also extremely user-friendly. Despite the technical complexity of the material, Lamport successfully conveys the use of this highly technical software in an easily understandable manner. The pages are well organized, and the information is not densely packed, making it easy to find the content you need. With a reasonable length, the book does not require multiple sessions to work through. Once you become familiar with the content, it is quite easy to find what you are looking for in this book.

Especially, if you write technical documents with mathematical formulas, you will find LaTeX extremely useful. When creating longer documents, the ability to automatically generate tables of contents, lists of figures and tables, bibliographies, and indices makes the software even more valuable, and the time invested in learning to use it will prove worthwhile.

“LaTeX – A Document Preparation System: User’s Guide and Reference Manual” provides you with the necessary guidance to master LaTeX. It is designed for technically inclined users but not computer experts. Lamport expects users of the software to have a technical background, as that is the software’s primary purpose - to create technical documents. However, he does not assume that readers are computer experts. This makes the book an excellent resource for anyone looking to use LaTeX for document creation.

Reviewed by Janina Deilke, September 2023