I want to write an tutorial which I want to publish as PDF. I love Apple Pages, but unfortunately I don't see how it would support Programming Code Listings. I am sure here are a few book authors who can tell us what tools they used to create their programming books.
Well actually I think it would just be enough to have an box where I could paste in the code fragments, so that it appears in an specific style (ie fixed with font).
I tried with MS Word and it was just absolutely horrible.
LaTeX is what I've used for technical writing.
My main motivations for using it over other editors is that it is good at technical notation (especially mathematical notation) and that it's free.
I usually use Word, because many customers require it anyway and we have appropriate templates. If you copy code from Visual Studio, the syntax highlighting is retained and can be pasted into Word, so no problem there. And at least Microsoft's PDF/XPS plugin for Office 2007 makes for fine PDF documents. So you might not like Word, but horrible is something else :)
I especially like Office 2007's new drawing system, with styles and themes and all those fluffy designs. Makes it easy to create really great diagrams and change their style instantly.
Many technical writers, of course, use LaTeX and friends for such things. I didn't ever experience the benefits of that for my work though. If you just hate Office, you can give OpenOffice a try.
I have used Adobe Framemaker for all of my books. It is exceptional for writing technical material. It's template-based, so you can create a template for your code listings and they will all be formatted correctly.