New Members ⇒ Hi from London, how to start?

[thag1987]

Hey community.

I'm currently living in London and determined to become proficient in latex. Rather than doing one off projects, I'd like to create templates for all kind of purposes in the daily life. CV's, letter templates, motivational paper, fact sheets, planner and more. I know there a lots of templates out there, but creating something individual is quite appealing and a great opportunity to learn a new skill.

I've used tex ages ago in school and know some basics, but am basically a noob. Can you recommend an approach for self-teaching latex? Should I take on one project and do learning by doing or are there some really good resources to work through (e.g. videos)? I'm fairly decent in html and css, so not starting totally blank.

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome,

there are many many templates out there, mostly because template in the world of LaTeX has very different meanings.

Using LaTeX there is often more than one way to achieve a goal. To decide which fits best for a given situation is hard to judge and needs some knowledge. Getting knowledge is best done reading a book, for example the featured book on the right, written by our administrator.
I also like LaTeX for complete novices,

Once you know the very basics (and tested along reading), you can really start with your projects and define your own constructs. It is not that hard.

btw: you can find quite a bunch of templates at LaTeXtemplates.com, but please read the basics before looking at them.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

Johannes already mentioned my LaTeX Beginner's Guide, thanks! Now with link to click for the contents. It's a quick start, but more for users, not template or class authors. But it helps with the first steps.

This year, I will publish a new book, a LaTeX cookbook. It's already announced by the publisher. He still shall improve the cover page regarding the LaTeX logo.

In my humble opinion, the best and most motivating way of learning LaTeX is joining forum discussions. Many of us TeX friends gained a lot of expertise by helping users in forums, by troubleshooting their problems. During this we read package documentation and source codes ourselves and learn a lot by the way. I dealt with thousand things in LaTeX forums like here, not so much for my own documents.

Stefan

[Johannes_B]

In my humble opinion, the best and most motivating way of learning LaTeX is joining forum discussions. Many of us TeX friends gained a lot of expertise by helping users in forums, by troubleshooting their problems. During this we read package documentation and source codes ourselves and learn a lot by the way. I dealt with thousand things in LaTeX forums like here, not so much for my own documents.

That is an exellent point. By helping others you are getting fluent and know what to do or where to look for solutions in the future. Reading a bit and trying to understand the solutions, getting to know a bit more than the mere basics i needed for my own documents raised my knowledge.