BKTEXEXM.RVW 940512 Academic Press Professional 525 B Street, Suite 1900 San Diego, CA 92101-4495 619-699-6362 fax: 619-699-6380 or 1250 Sixth Ave San Diego, CA 92101 619-231-0926 800-321-5068 or 955 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 Josh Mills, Marketing, jmills@acad.com publisher@igc.org "TeX by Example", Borde, 1992, 0-12-117650-9 TeX (pronounced to rhyme with "wreck" rather than "sex") is a language, and a series of tools for the typesetting and printing of text. It is so very widely used in the academic environment that some online documents are made available in "TeX only" format, in spite of the fact that most terminals can't display italics. Simple TeX commands may look a bit odd, but it doesn't take much effort to figure out that {\bf text} means that the word "text" should be in boldface print. Hence the idea behind this book. It started out as a set of reference notes on how to use TeX, and they were undoubtedly of the form, "Use these commands and the output looks like this." The notes became a handout for friends; the handout got popular; and, now, we have a very helpful tutorial and reference guide. Each set of facing pages is, in fact, one document. On the left page is the source text, itself, with the TeX commands, and on the right is the result. About half of the book is made up of short examples of different types of documents and, as the author suggests, you can simply flip through until you find what you want to do, and the look of the command to do it. Each page contains notes when the example might not be clear about the usage. However, there is also a brief tutorial to begin, and a thorough appendix reference at the end. For those familiar with the basics of TeX, there are also examples of more advanced formatting, up to and including scripts, conditionals, and programming. This book is therefore suitable for any users, from the most basic, through to advanced. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKTEXEXM.RVW 940512 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag