[texhax] LaTeX Student

[Kazuo Yamazaki]

Dear TUG:

My name is Kazuo Yamazaki. I am a math student at Stanford University. I am a typical math student type who has dove into more theoretical side of studies and spent most of my days on blackboard rather than on computer. Consequently, I have had much trouble understanding how to use LaTeX. I really want to understand how to use this program; I have recently written a research paper with a professor and he prefers that I write the draft using LaTeX. I have already tried for a few days to understand how to use it and already ran into troubles. I wonder if I could e-mail you questions periodically and obtain help from you with promise to reply to my questions in a day, or as soon as possible, with enough detail for a beginner like myself to be able to understand. If such request requires that I become a member of TUG, please feel free to inform me as I will be more than happy to. 

Below I typed the questions that I already have so you get an idea of what kind of questions to expect from me:

I went to the CTAN main webpage listed below:

http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html

and downloaded the proTeXt. The web page explained that it has "full TeX system, including LaTeX." But where is LaTeX? After the download was complete, I opened the folder and found the following folders inside:

addons, combobox-2.3, doc, gsv, Install, MiKTeX, Sources, TeXnicCenter, unsupported

I understand that MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter are important features but they are different from LaTeX, aren't they? Assuming MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter are not LaTeX, only thing I could guess after hours of banging my head was that inside the folder "unsupported," there was "texmakerwin32_install" which I downloaded and obtained bunch of pictures and documents and one feature entitled "texmaker." Is that the LaTeX? But if it is LaTex, why, when I click on a button LATEX or PDFLAT, it says "Can't detect the file name"? What does that even mean? 

I have a similar problem with TeXnicCenter. Why, when I try to view output via F5, does it say "Cannot execute the command"?

If you could help me, I would really really appreciate it. Otherwise, please advise me to somewhere else where I could get help.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Kazuo Yamazaki
1339 Cuernavaca Circulo
Mountain View, CA 94040
Cell: (347) 489-0059