In agreement with the publisher, the “LaTeX Beginner’s Guide” ebook will soon be officially available for free download. But this will be for a single day only, within the next two weeks. I cannot tell the date yet, not even if it’s tomorrow or next week. Otherwise, the regular price is € 24.97, just € 0,00 during 24 hours, as the publisher allowed.
I’m the author of the book; and I want to make it freely available for our LaTeX friends who support or share our hobby without getting paid or rewarded for it. So, while on Stack Exchange we get reputation points and shiny badges for producing content and for various kinds of activity, there are still older web forums without that game. That’s why my personal reward gets there at first: the whole story with more information and updates is here on LaTeX-Community.org.
Though it’s an internal subforum thread to honor members, everybody can easily join to read it. A small LaTeX challenge question prevents bots from entering, but it won’t be an obstacle for a LaTeX friend.
Life is peaceful there. No race to be the first, and room for all. There are hundreds if not thousands of unanswered questions, and even more unsolved questions
Would you like to help out a bit? If I see some of our fellow TeX friends from here helping with their experience to solve some topics and to answer some lonely question, I’ll thank by sharing the upcoming download link for here as well.
Have a gut feeling that it’s kind of site promotion? Well, LaTeX-Community.org already promotes TeX.SE, for example Luca’s recent articles on the front page are purely advertising TeX.SE solutions.
It is a good idea to promote LATEX
I can’t wait to read and share this book. Thanks in advance for effort and work.
@Lazlo Sorry, I had to remove your post. The publisher doesn’t allowed even me as the author to speak about the date before it actually comes. He got his reasons, and I don’t want you or TeX.SE to get complaints by them or to see that they respond by stopping that action for the LaTeX book.Their general current promotion time ends March 5, so it’s a matter of few days.
At this occasion, short statistics. 🙂 Already 1 member of TeX.SE appeared to help out in answering 2 unanswered questions, showing that LaTeX support over different channels is possible without getting reputation points for this.
I silently hoped for a success story like “X well known TeX.SE members were our guests for 3 days and easily managed to solve 150 of 2000 unanswered questions“. Well we still have some days. 🙂 Thank you, Harish, for your first helpful posts!
Your book contains several typos.
Also, I feel it strange that you only introduce the gui tool and not clearly how to get through pdflatex, etc. That made me do further research which I think could have been shortly explained in the book instead.
Another strange thing was that it was not mentioned in the chapter where you describe how to write a book that whether this book would also be written using LaTeX.
I think that could be quite useful information to the reader and it would not take long pages either, just 1-2 sentences…
By the way, if you are so worried about illegit stuff, I am sure you may see what I do. If I type your book into google, the first result is a presumably illegal distribution…
In my upcoming book (this year) I am clarifying that the book design is not LaTeX and that LaTeX output won’t be perfectly processed by the publisher so the image quality is not optimal. Publisher’s responsibility, their sales loss if somebody would not like the image quality.
Dealing with illegal copies is the publisher’s task. I don’t care about the commercial thing.
As for the date, the publisher shared it with me without indicating that it must be kept private. I also do not see the point of making it private since it means your book will get to fewer people than with known date. You know… not everyone is able to monitor the progress every single day, and they might get annoyed by noticing that “Oops, it was free yesterday…”.
But I am now asking the publisher for confirmation whether or not this can be shared.
If I had not mentioned, thank you for your book. It surely is not that long as the companion LaTeX book, but I think this is more targetted at beginners like me to get quickly up to speed.
Thank you, please tell us what the publisher responded! And if he or she said, the date is fix and can be said in advance, feel free to tell all here!
I just take care that nobody sees a reason to stop that or to replace the LaTeX book by another one in the current promotion. So that the book will goes out for free that day. Less than a week left anyway.
Unfortunately, the publisher does not allow to publish the date, so I encourage every latex enthusiasts to monitor daily and/or we can perhaps also announce when the date is known, i.e. put a big “notice” somewhere that “today, it is” when the day is here. 😉
I am also in the process of going through with my book idea at Packt, but if it cannot be done in LaTeX, I am a bit worried. I prefer command line. I was also going to check on google if there is any Packt template done, already.
Thank you for your book again and the collaboration with Packt to make a “free day” to remember. 🙂