LaTeX books VS online tutorials?

Question

What were you missing from the online tutorials and manuals, that you found well explained in LaTeX books? Any LaTeX book, but I'm mainly referring to The LaTeX Companion by Mittlebach, and the A Guide to LaTeX by Kopka.

I'm working on a book project in LaTeX and the question came up why don't I buy these much reputed books. Until now I learnt what I use from online tutorials and manuals, but these can be tedious or rudimentary in some cases.

So my counter-question is that in what areas do these books really make a difference?

Answer 1

Read the TeXBook written by Donald Knuth. I think there is no online tutorial that explains the mechanism of creating paragraphs and formulas.

For example if you want to manipulate such macros like \let, \futurelet, \catcode, \edef, \xdef, \expandafter, \afterassignment, \tolerance and \pretolerance, \ifx, \ifcat you have to read the TeXBook.

Do you know the difference between the \kern 1em and \hskip 1em? Which online manual explains this? TeXBook does.

Answer 2

There were precious few questions I had that were left unanswered by the Not So Short guide. I never bought a book because I never had the need.

Answer 3

The difference, in a nutshell, is that books cost extra money, and online tutorials and documentation cost extra time. That said, the distinction is being blurred as more coherent documentation comes online, such as the LaTeX wikibook (which is now a decent replacement for The LaTeX Companion).

Answer 4

I found the LaTeX companion helpful within the first couple of things I read [it is a lot of $$, though]. I would say the key things to read would be:

• not so short guide
• wikibook
• the manuals for each package and class used [KOMA and Memoir classes are very thorough]

And not least, comp.text.tex.