Stefan Kottwitz, LaTeX Cookbook: Over 90 hands-on recipes for quickly preparing LaTeX documents to solve various challenging tasks, Packt Publishing, October 2015, 357 pp., softcover, US$41.99, ISBN 1784395145. https://www.packtpub.com/product/latex-cookbook/9781784395148
After complaining to Stefan Kottwitz that his LaTeX Beginner’s Guide1 didn’t say anything about TikZ and BibLaTeX, Stefan referred me to his LaTeX Cookbook, published in 2015, and also kindly made a copy available to me for a review. If you are not lucky enough to receive a free copy, you can find the book for just over 40 Euros in on- and offline bookstores.
The book is in English. It contains a total of 100 LaTeX recipes on 378 pages, divided into the following categories:
The Variety of Document Types
(introduction of various document classes)
Tuning the Text
(accents, boxes, absolute positioning)
Adjusting Fonts
(fonts, ligatures, font families)
Working with Images
(images, more on images, …)
Beautiful Designs
(background images, ornaments)
Designing Tables
(typesetting tables)
Contents, Indexes and Bibliographies
(about lists/tables of contents, etc.)
Getting the Most out of the PDF
(PDF metadata)
Creating Graphics (TikZ)
Advanced Mathematics
(plotting functions)
Science and Technology
(typesetting units, chemistry symbols)
Getting Support on the Internet
(how to find help on the web)
Within those categories there are individual topics such as “Creating a large poster”. Every topic is then divided into several sections:
Introduction, what is it all about;
“How to do it…”, a foolproof step-by-step guide;
“How it works…”, with some explanations about what one has just done;
“There is more…”, with additional remarks to alternative packages.
Despite being almost ten years old, and with plenty of changes to LaTeX in the meantime, the vast majority of the cookbook recipes are still relevant today—a monument to LaTeX’s basic stability and Stefan’s careful writing.
I greatly like this approach, and learned a few tricks myself that I can apply in my own documents or the LaTeX courses I teach. So it is easy for me to recommend this book.