Rating: 
Summary: The best LaTeX book
Review: A superb book: everything you really need to know about LaTeX, impeccably organized and clearly expressed. A pleasure to read and to use.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a good advertisement for LaTeX
Review: Any book that claims to cater for beginners and advanced users alike has quite a task ahead of it and I don't believe this guide to LaTeX does justice to either category of user.The true nature of this 616 page beast is spelt out in chapter 1, where the reader is advised that the book "is designed for LaTeX users who have little or no experience with computers" and that there exists "considerable repetition in the text". Unless you have a solid week to spare and the memory of a gold fish this book has the potential to be incredibly frustrating. Instead of being immersed in worthwhile examples demonstrating the true power of LaTeX, the reader is forced to trawl through paragraph after paragraph of verbose explanation. Worse still, with minimal imagination employed in presentation, the fact that this book was typeset using LaTeX doesn't inspire confidence - helpful hints supposedly written in a smaller typeface to make them distinct, simply disappear into the sea of sentences. There are many LaTeX references out there to chose from, but inevitably all books in the market place must be compared with texts by Goossens et al (400 pages, published 1994) and LaTeX developer Lamport (272 pages, published 1994). Other reviewers have correctly pointed out that this book covers more than others combined. The plethora of appendices is dense but in some cases not as useful as would first appear. For instance, one table included contains a complete list of possible PostScript fonts, great you say, until you notice that they're all displayed in the same font! However, combining this unrivalled brevity with the fact that LaTeX is updated on an annual basis and it's not hard to see why you might opt for a book published in 1999, which is larger and relatively priced to both alternative books published in 1994. With a LaTeX 3 version in the pipeline and with the internet offering a number of compact LaTeX HOWTO's and quick references (most notably "The Not-So-Short Guide to LaTeX"), a wise alternative might be to arm yourself with a downloaded guide and actually learn through trying (inevitably making your fair share of mistakes along the way) and to hold off to see what the next generation of published LaTeX references have to offer.
Rating:
Summary: best LaTeX book on the market!
Review: Back when I started using LaTeX, I bought this book expecting it to be a good guide along the way. That was two years ago, and now I have to say that it is not only the best tutorial/reference on LaTeX, it is also the most well-worn book in my vast collection of computer literature. Only recently did I stop finding the answers I was looking for in this book, and that is because I have (I believe) matured to an advanced LaTeX user. This book covers everything you need to know as you're starting out: basic usage of everything, basic font changing, basic graphics, tables, letters, bibliographies, mathematics, and basic programming. If you're starting out and you have a question, the answer is in this book. I've flipped through Leslie Lamport's book, and I found it to be too sparse of an introduction. This book is for the hardcore user, the one who wants to do all his English papers in something more powerful and at the same time faster. This book showed me that text processing really can replace word processing. After you see the output, you'll be in love. What sets this book apart is that it really is what the title says: for beginning AND advanced users. No one is left out. Definitely pick it over the other introductions, because it will be with you for the long haul.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks to authors
Review: For those, who is using LaTeX often this book is very, very
helpful and I think it is a very good price for that
book too. I am tired of all "... dummies" stuff, so it
is just a pleasure to have that masterpiece on your shelf
and use it whatever you need it. This book is well planned,
well structured, so even if you an expert, but need a reference
it is very easy to get one right away. Thanks to Mr. Kopka & Mr. Daly.
Rating: 
Summary: Word almost does everything LaTeX does...
Review: I bought this book a couple of months ago, planning to write my thesis using it. In the beginning, I could not comprehend what was going on. After a while, I started understanding it, but the number of times I needed to refer to the book even to do something simple exasperated me in no time. While it's true that the quality of the output is superlative to word processing packages, I wonder if it's worth the time you need to put into it. I had to spend nearly a hour just to change the margins on the page! MS Word began to look more and more attractive to me and I managed to get an automatic table of contents using the styles options in it. Maybe LaTeX will become easy, but right now, I am sticking with Word. The book is good, but the software itself is not all that useful in the present day context.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for getting started in LaTeX.
Review: I had no background in LaTeX and needed to turn out a paper quickly. The second edition of this book had all the information that I needed to get it done. I expect that the third edition is more and better. Try it.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent tutorial *or* reference!
Review: I had to write an extremely formula intensive paper with loads of archane mathematical symbols, and I had no previous knowledge of TeX or LaTeX. Without this book, I'd still be formatting that paper. Almost everything I needed to know about LaTeX, I learned in about an afternoon and a half from this well organized treatment of LaTeX. "A Guide..." is filled with usefull examples, explains the important concepts and features clearly and concisely, and provides an extensive appendix covering most of the features of LaTeX. I chose Kopka's "Guide" over the Lamport book because Kopka seems to provide a more comprehensive coverage of the language and the organization better fit my needs. However, I don't think you can go wrong with either book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for a beginner
Review: I think this is a great book for the LaTeX beginner. I went from complete novice to competent in a single evening. I particularly liked the exercises provided at the end of the sections. They gave me a chance to immediately try out what I just learned. The organization of the book let me quickly skim over sections that are not pertinent to me. I only plan to use a small subset of LaTeX's features, at least for now. The book is typeset using LaTeX (of course), which is nice because the solutions to the exercises looked exactly like what I saw on my screen. LaTeX is a complex, initially daunting program. This book makes it easy for anyone to start using LaTeX to produce beautiful documents.
Rating:
Summary: Book author strongly recommends
Review: I use LaTeX on a daily basis and wrote a textbook (Numerical Methods for Physics) using it. With a bookshelf full of LaTeX books, this is always the first one I look at and 98% of the time, the only one I need. Excellent. (Note: Review for Second Edition)
Rating:
Summary: Has been very useful to me, but has a few glitches
Review: I'm a new convert to LaTeX, having tried to write my own macro sets for TeX since I started using it around 10 years ago. This book in it's previous versions has been highly recommended, and I must say it quickly gets you into the thick of things. The book has been very helpful and seems to cover everything, but I still had some problems with it. For instance there is a typesetting glitch on the bottom of page 374 that is very jarring, when you consider this book is fundamentally about doing good (albeit computerized) typesetting. Also the explanation of how to set up an appendix is incomplete and I had to piece it together from other portions of the book. Still, the book covers a lot of ground, and covers it mostly pretty well.
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