A beginner's book of TeX

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

• svat · May 25, 2019 · Recommends

  …TeX (reprinted in his collection Literate Programming) goes into excellent detail on the development process. Also: a suggestion to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX), if you haven't tried it. The book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy is especially good. It might surprise you.

  on “The lingua franca of LaTeX” ↗
• svat · Jun 4, 2017 · Recommends

  What 600-page documentation are you referring to? The TeXbook by Knuth goes only up to page 483 (with the appendixes starting on page 304). By the way, a really excellent book for (plain) TeX is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy: it's truly for the beginner, yet at the end you'll be practically an expert, or at least know how to become one. I've seen people get frustrated with LaTeX (not TeX), but that's because…

  on “TeX Live 2017 released” ↗
• svat · May 28, 2020 · Recommends

  …that stuff with "\eqref{eq:foo}" or whatever. If macros are used, they tend to be custom for the document, rather than elaborate general-purpose ones. Consider giving plain TeX a try (a great book is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy); everything makes sense, you feel in power, all the error messages are clear (often the same error messages! but now they apply to something you actually wrote/intended), and if nothing…

  on “Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”” ↗
• svat · Jun 5, 2017 · Recommends

  Sure: The book I mentioned earlier (A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy) is my favourite learning resource. You may able to find it in a library, or wherever you look for books. (There are other books available for free online, such as A Gentle Introduction…

  on “TeX Live 2017 released” ↗
• svat · Sep 1, 2017 · Recommends

  If you want to start with TeX, I highly recommend the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. One of the developers behind LuaTeX also strongly recommends it (in the preface to the ConTeXt manual), and calls it "the book that turns every beginner into an expert". This one is…

  on “LuaTeX Comes of Age” ↗
• svat · Mar 15, 2018 · Recommends

  My favourite TeX tutorial, which will turn you from beginner to expert and make you fall in love with TeX (maybe), is the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. It comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the ConTeXt manual. (It's not free—published by Springer—but you can find it in the usual places you find books: libraries, whatever.)

  on “The Case for Writing Papers in Economics Using FaKe LaTeX [pdf]” ↗
• svat · Feb 28, 2020 · Recommends

  …messages are very informative and include a lot of information and give you ways to recover from your problem and poke around, get more context, etc. First you'll have to have read a manual (or I recommend A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy), but my claim is about the user experience in the steady state. Of course, part of the reason is that LaTeX is much more complicated than the low-level things one may be doing with…

  on “Was Knuth Really Framed?” ↗
• jhallenworld · May 24, 2022 · Recommends

  …Advanced TeXbook by David Salomon to be helpful. It shows how to make your own format on top of plain TeX, including table of contents, page numbering, cross-references and insertions. I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference. Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried in exercises…

  on “I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX” ↗