Installation:

TeX/LaTeX is installed on any computer belonging to the Mathematics Department network, whether under Solaris or Linux: on either one the same TeX/LaTeX distribution called teTeX.

You should consider installing TeX/LaTeX on your personal computer (laptop and desktop)

If your computer's operating system is any flavor of Linux then it is very likely that you already have some TeX/LaTeX distribution. For example, Fedora/Red Hat linux systems have teTeX distribution as a part of the operating system. For Unix/Linux systems teTeX is now regarded as a definitive TeX distribution.


An information on installing/using TeX on Mac OS X you can find in many places. This is the site where you will find possibly the most important TeX distribution for Mac OS X which is maintained by Gerben Wierda (it is sometimes called gwTeX).  It seems to me to be a port to Mac OS X of the teTeX distribution (I cannot say more, since I have a very limited experience using Apple products.)

You will find there also an excellent example of a sample LaTeX file together with full explanations the result it produces, so that site is recommended for everybody. This site at Pennsylvania State University seems to be a mine of information on TeX on Mac OS X.


If your operating system is any version of Microsoft Windows then I strongly recommend that  you install the MiKTeX distribution: its advantages are:
Before installing MiKTeX you should read the following document -- it may save you a lot of trouble later (e.g., you should check that the installation wizzard setup-2.4.1705.exe does not want to download the files needed for the installation (there will be over 100 of them) to a directory containing many other files like Desktop or My Documents).

Create first a new empty directory where all the packages will be downloaded; the installation wizzard will not create such a directory but will likely use by default whatever directory you download the wizzard to.


For years I have been using LaTeX exclusively on Unix/Linux machines, but I wanted to check whether you would be able to install MiKTeX yourself, I installed MiKTeX today (Oct 8, 2005) on the Windows partition of my laptop.  The installation was quite straightforward (but pay attention to the warning issued above).

Subsequent installation of LEd was smooth. MiKTeX was recognized without problem.

When you install TeXnicCenter, make sure that when you open it for the first time a configuration window pops up -- you need to tell it that you want to use TeXnicCenter with MiKTeX (that is a default for TeXnicCenter).I had to reinstall TeXnicCenter; I suppose TeXnicCenter installer was confused by the presence of

C:\Program Files\TexLive

directory that was a left-over form another popular distribution of TeX which I attempted to install long ago. Deleting that directory and reinstalling TeXnicCenter cured the problem. Everything works perfectly. You really should not have much trouble doing all of this yourself.

Using LaTeX:
  1. My own resources
  2. CTAN
  3. A showcase of TeX capabilities (many sample .tex files)
  4. MUSA resources
  5. LaTeX Tutorial
  6. LaTeX Primer (1995)
  7. Math into LaTeX (a well known book generously donated by the author to the TeX archive)
  8. An extremely informative document maintained by the UK TeX User Group
"Googling" latex primer, or latex tutorial will bring you even more resources.

Some recommended books:
LaTeX is one of the formats of the TeX program. I personally almost always use PDFLaTeX which produces PDF files as its output. Other versions include (plain) (PDF)TeX which is still useful and sometimes almost indispensible; etex/elatex and its PDF versions: pdfetex/pdfelatex are essential when you plan to produce right-to-left, or bi-directional documents (your quiz was produced with pdfelatex). On the other hand AMSTeX (or AMS-LaTeX) is obsolete and I suggest you never use it (the sources are very difficult to convert to LaTeX which superseded it.


The source file that contains the text your document by convention have extension .tex

There are basically only two types of .tex files:
  1. the LaTeX ones (they can be processed with latex, elatex, pdflatex, or pdfelatex),
  2. and the TeX ones (they can be processed with tex, etex, pdftex, or pdfetex).
If you see near the beginning of  the file the directive

\documentclass{article}

or something similar, then you are dealing with the LaTeX file,
if the file contains no such directive, and moreover ends in the directive

\bye

then it is most likely a TeX file.