LaTeX Primer
Overview
LaTeX is a high-quality, powerful typesetting system, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. Most scientific papers, journals and books are written with the help of LaTeX. It can save you time, and headache, especially in documents that contain heavy mathematical equations. For a further detailed overview of what LaTeX is all about, please read this introductory material.
How do I get it?
There are many free implementations of LaTeX that you can download. For MS-Windows, MiKTeX is a great choice. For UNIX compatible operating systems (including Linux and FreeBSD), teTeX works very well.
Getting started
As a beginner, The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e is an excellent tutorial to get you started. It is very comprehensive, covering the basics of the language through to some advanced layout topics. It is definately worth printing and binding for future reference!
Advanced usage
LaTeX can be advanced as you want it to be. There are literally thousands of LaTeX packages to do just about anything you can think of.
Documentation that is often of use includes Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX2e and the User Guide for the amsmath package, that describes, in detail, how to use the great AMS maths package.
Generating and managing references
With BibTeX, you can create, manage and format all of your references very easily. The general idea is this: you have one or more reference databases from which you make citations in your paper/book/article. LaTeX and BibTeX will automatically generate a reference list and include your citations, using an optional style sheet if required. The end result is a very professional looking document!
Making it all easier
Having read the above references, you will know and appreciate why LaTeX uses a simple text file format for documents. This is great, but having some sort of program to execute LaTeX and associated viewers, while doing spell checking, etc., would be extremely useful and productive. Fortunately there are many such programs out there. Some are even available as a free download!
The first, named TeXnicCenter, is an open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX documents under MS-Windows. Being open-source, this is totally free.
The second of note is the WinEdt Shell, a commercial (shareware) software product by Aleksander Simonic. It is also very good.
Further information
There is much more to LaTeX than that shown here. We encourage you to use the basic knowledge gained from the above information to search for more information using engines such as Google.