Rating: 
Summary: 95% of the reviews are unfortunately not relevant
Review: As one of the authors of of this book (first and second edition) I'm somewhat annoyed to find that suddenly the existing reviews to the second edition (2 with 5 stars) have vanished and instead been replaced by 18 reviews to the first edition (which is 10 years old) + 1 that seems to be for the second edition.
However only for 2 or 3 of them Amazon actually notes that fact, ie for most of them you can only deduce it by comparing the publishing date of the edition (April 2004) with the dates of the reviews.
While most of them are favorable, I do think this is not helping anybody as the books has changed far too much. To give you some overview here: about 90% of the original book has been rewritten due to the fact that in 10 years software changes :-) In addition due to the amount of good new material in the LaTeX community the book was extended from 550 pages to 1120, ie, more than doubled in size. Also one of the negative remarks in the reviews for the first edition (bad index) was explicitly addressed by producing the index together with a professional indexer.
Finally one point (not mentioned in the first edition's reviews) has been addressed: the ready to run examples (nearly 1000) are now 100% accurate, ie the output shown has be automatically compiled from the input as shown in the book, so you see precisely how solutions will come out after processing and not how authors believe how they come out.
I hope that Amazon rectifies this problem and puts the new reviews back on and removes the old ones or at least marks them correctly as referring to an out-of-print version. Until then I urge everbody to read those reviews with the above understanding in mind. --- clearly new reviews from readers of the second edition would also be helpful. (ps, yes i rated it 5 stars even though i'm the author, a) to get your attention and b) as it replaces the reviews already being there before and c) because I honestly believe that it is much better than the first edition)
When I first wrote this review I forgot to mention that you can preview the TOC, full chapter 3, and the index in pdf format at:
http://www.latex-project.org/guides
Rating: 
Summary: Yep, you'll need this one too.
Review: Everyone seems to recommends this as a "second" or companion LaTeX book following the purchase of Lamport's guide. Buying these two books and trying to learn LaTeX is like trying to learn a foreign language from that language's physics texts--you'll be exasperated in no time. Anyway, this book lists many of the text massaging add-on packages to LaTeX available via download from CTAN. For that use, it's great. (Without reading this book, I probably would never have figured out that the easiest way to indent the first paragraph after the section heading is simply to use the "indentfirst" package.) You'll find a lot of packages that you'll need instantly and probably many more that you will just chuckle about as you read the commands. ("Hey, lookee here at this mini table of contents for-each-chapter package. It's probably a pain in the butt to learn... .)You will eventually need this book even if you are a rank LaTeX novice so you might as well buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: All the things you wish were written in Lamport's guide
Review: First, a remark on the title: this is not a companion to theprogram, but rather a companion to some other book on LaTeX you shouldhave. I bought this book back in 1994, when it was the first book onLaTeX2e, and by now it is thoroughly worn (though the binding is still doing its job well :). However, at the time I bought it, I have already been using LaTeX for six years, and have read Lamport's guide (which is charming, and also the book The Companion intends to accompany) and Kopka and Daly's (which is better organized and more complete). The LaTeX Companion is something between an advanced course tutorial (could just as well be named Selected Chapters from LaTeX) and a reference book. None of them was ever aimed at beginners, and this one is no exception. LaTeX comes with a rich legacy of add-on macro packages doing various useful and nifty things with lists, floats, tables, formulas, graphics, fonts, indices and bibliographies. This book covers some of them. I would love to see second edition of this book covering more of them. There is a treasure hidden at CTAN, but it is usually hard to find it. The examples are well chosen and it is easy to learn from them. I am less pleased with the index. At 36 pages, it looks very promising, but it rarely led me to the place I sought. During years of use, I mostly figured out where in a book things are, and stopped using it. Despite the confusing index, the book is worth its (admittedly high) price and you will probably learn many useful things from it. The idea of a thin tutorial and a partly-overlapping "companion book" doesn't appeal to me, though. Personally, I would prefer one single book with a complete treatment of the topic.
Rating:
Summary: Good LaTeX reference
Review: I have been using LaTeX for a few years now, but there always seem to be things that I don't know how to do (use the wingdings font) or can't get to look quite right (complex, multicolumn tables). I have some other LaTeX reference books that have helped, but this one seems to better than the rest. I really like the way the examples are presented. The examples are complete and very easy to use. I sometimes have a hard time finding exactly what I want via the index, but the index tends to at least put me in the right ballpark.
The book does cover the basics of vanilla LaTeX, but it also does a very good job of talking about the important CTAN packages. I think this is a good move as the authors have decided to present things in the simplest way even if it means using a 3rd party package. I generally don't want to spend time searching for a good CTAN package, but here the authors have done this work for me. It is nice.
I would have liked to see a bit more about LaTeX graphics in this book, but I guess that is what The LaTeX Graphics Companion is for. Can we get an update to that book?
Rating:
Summary: Good, but NOT for beginners
Review: If you are a beginner in LaTeX, better look for another book. If you have experience on the subject and want something to help you writing your thesis (as my case) or higher level things (or want to know deeply LaTeX), this book is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Great Advanced Reference
Review: It should be illegal to own this book if you aren't already very comfortable using LaTex. However, when you are ready to move beyond the default formatting of the LaTex macros, this book is absolutely necessary. I recently had to write my own document class for Technical Reports at my work place. I had used Kopka and Daly for years and was very satisfied, but found it to be of limited utility for things like redefining the sectioning commands or the \cite command. It is at this level that Goosens is most useful. This book also does a nice job of documenting lots of the more commonly used LaTex packages (so good, in fact, that the documentation for the "supertabular" package refers the reader to Goosens).
Rating:
Summary: (Almost) everything you want
Review: My personal favorite. I have been using both the German and the English version of this boock since 1996, and I just love it. Granted, the world has moved on, and many things about LaTeX have changed and still are, and yet, there is so much information in this book. I only hope the authors soon prepare an updated version including the latest developments.
Rating:
Summary: A True Companion
Review: Pocket Review: *The* bible to keep on your desk if you use LaTex.
I love type. Ever since I got into computers, back when high resolution was a 132 column printer, I've tried to find ways to play with typesetting and fonts. I wrote a basic layout system in OMSI Pascal that drove daisywheel printers. I got to be quite an expert at nroff and troff. I used to hunt (without success) for a free copy of Scribe. I played with Lout, and a dozen other packages. But nothing, ever, held a candle to TeX when it comes to the quality of the output it produces.
Ignore for the moment some of the uglier fonts than some TeX users employ, and look instead at the pages. Hold them up at a distance and admire the uniformity of the gray: no rivers of white to be seen. Look at the bottoms of the page: if the typesetter didn't totally goof off, they'll be vertically balanced: an open spread is
the same height on both pages (TeX'll add tiny amounts of leading to make it happen). Dig into the line-breaking, and you'll find optimization algorithms, which shuffle words back and forth trying to minimize the <em>badness</em> of the appearance.
The output of TeX gives me a lot of pleasure.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its input. Don Knuth is clearly a genius, but as with all wizards, his creations can be tricky. In the case of TeX, we have a typesetting engine driven by a macro processor whose interpretation of syntax can be changed while it is in the middle of processing individual commands. Raw TeX is scary to deal with, so people don't deal with it. Instead, they use its power to write macro packages, abstracting the low level commands into something more palatable (and tractable). The most widely used of these is Leslie Lamport's LaTeX. LaTeX is at its heart a logical mark up system, documented in an admirably short and lucid book, <em>LaTeX: A Document Preparation System.</em>
But when you want to use LaTeX to do serious work, you need more than this small book. When you want to set complex tables, or handle floating material a certain way, or get your index looking just right, you need the real scoop. And you turn to just one book.
The original <em>LaTeX Companion</em> was one of those books that never got returned to my bookshelf. I used it almost every day for 4 years during the typesetting of five books. Thanks to its wealth of detail, I was able to create press-ready files straight from my computer to the exacting specification of the production departments of three separate printers.
But now, that worn old book has been retired. Mittlebach and Goossens have
produced a second edition of <em>The LaTeX Companion,</em> and it's better in every possible way. In the ten years since the first was published, a lot has changed, and the book captures it all. New packages, improvements in encodings, font handling, xindy: the book describes it all. My copy arrived a couple of weeks before
Mike Clark's <em>Pragmatic Project Automation</em> book was due to go to the printers. I devoured it, and immediately used its advice to improve the appearance of ragged-right text, fix up some font issues in the code listings, and improve the handling of included graphics. Since then, it's been a true companion as I've worked with the typesetting of the new edition of <em>Programming Ruby</em>.
I don't often gush, but if you use LaTeX, or if you'd just like to produce great looking typeset output, you owe it to yourself to get this book.
Rating:
Summary: An extensive reference
Review: Some people seem to critize this book for not being readable. In a way this is true, because it is not written for a beginner in LaTeX. Use another (shorter) book to learn the basics of LaTex. This book however is great as a reference when writing a paper etc. It covers all of the more advanced features you need after learning the basic features of LaTex.
Rating:
Summary: not perfect, but indispensible
Review: The bottom line is: This is the most useful book on latex2e that I own. I use it all the time. This is not a great book, but there aren't many good books on latex2e and this is probably the best or close to best there is. There aren't good books on latex; there are very few good books on tex. People don't buy these books because they're fun or interesting, or make good reading, but because they need to get things done and they want the book to show them how. The latex companion will show you how to get things done. If you need to typeset latex documents often, probably "pure latex" in itself won't be enough for you, and the book will make you aware of this fact: It surveys some of the more useful packages for doing useful things: long tables, inserting and manipulating graphics, etc. Once you get the hang of going over to CTAN, checking for useful packages that do the stuff you need, downloading and installing them, you'll be "on your own" and will be able to progress independently. I haven't found a need for another latex manual beyond the Latex Companion, though an O'Reilly pocket reference for tex and latex would have been great! (O'Reilly: Are you reading this???) There are some subjects it doesn't treat well, like foreign languages in latex, but otherwise, it's fine. Another downside is that the book doesn't treat the issues of pdf generation, html generation and hyperlinks, which are becoming very popular in latex circles. Get this book, and you will probably not need another latex book until the O'Reilley pocket reference to tex and latex comes out.
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