If you’ve clicked on this BCG (Best Courses Guide), you’re probably a university student, a lecturer, researcher, or perhaps an avid math fan who wants to take their document preparation skills to the next level. And let me tell you, you’ve come to the right place!
LaTeX is a powerful yet flexible document preparation system with almost 4 decades of history. Almost all math papers are written in LaTeX thanks to its extensive support for whatever arcane-looking runes and symbols mathematicians manage to come up with. According to a study, approximately 26% of submissions to scientific scholarly journals are written in LaTeX.
At its core, however, LaTeX is a markup language. That means instead of having whatever you type immediately appear on the page like Microsoft Word (WYSIWYG), you write commands that then need to be compiled to display an output file. This may be a little intimidating at first, especially if you’ve never used markup or programming languages before, but with the right guidance and training, anyone can learn to use LaTeX like a pro!
Hence, I’ve compiled the best courses to learn LaTeX in this guide. Whether it’s for math, engineering, or science, or maybe you just like pretty documents, I’ve got you covered!
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Here are our top picks
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What is LaTeX?
LaTeX is a document preparation system that enables users to produce high-quality documents with a focus on content over appearance.
Its origins can be traced back to the 1970s, when the legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth created Tex, a new typesetting system whose purpose was “to make a system that’s so simple that you can’t possibly do anything ugly in it”.
He succeeded in one of his goals: you can’t do anything ugly in TeX. However, many people thought that TeX was too complex and difficult to use. So, a decade later, Leslie Lamport set out to create a new document preparation system that leverages the powerful TeX engine while simplifying its use. And thus, LaTeX (short for Lamport TeX) was born, consisting of macros and templates that make it easier to produce complex documents with consistent formatting and style.
Templating a document, structuring sections, generating complex mathematical equations and formulas—features once thought to only belong to experts—are now at the fingertips of anyone with the will to learn. You have precise control over all things. Additionally, LaTeX introduced new features like bibliographies, making it an attractive option for academics and researchers, particularly mathematicians. Even we here at Class Central have used LaTeX in our Udemy paper.
Thanks to the thriving LaTeX community, there are countless packages available to meet a wide range of needs including babel, TikZ, and Beamer. LaTeX is widely used worldwide for technical and scientific documents, from research papers and academic theses to books and even presentations! And despite the emergence of other document preparation systems, LaTeX still remains a popular choice for those who require precise and professional-looking output decades later.
Why You Should Trust Us
Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 60 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 200,000 online courses and 200,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.
Courses Overview
- All of the courses are suitable for beginners
- All of the courses are free
- Three of the courses in this guide are made by mathematicians, for mathematicians
- The most represented provider is YouTube, followed by edX and then independent providers.
Built and led by the members of the LaTeX project themselves, learnlatex.org is a free course that is one of the most helpful and up-to-date introductory LaTeX courses available.
This course is designed for absolute beginners, covering the essential ideas behind core LaTeX packages and classes. Thus, while the course is limited in scope, sticking only to the base concepts, it nonetheless gives newbies a strong foundation in LaTeX to write mathematical equations, insert graphs and figures, and generate reports through bite-sized article lessons, interactive code examples, and exercises. Laying a solid foundation is crucial since you can’t use custom packages properly without knowing how to use the core ones.
The course is LaTeX distribution agnostic, and doesn’t use any specific LaTeX editor, though the code examples can be run with either Overleaf or TeXLive.net.
How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
I built this guide following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:
- Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 200K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of LaTeX courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
- Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
- Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and fit in a set of criteria: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.
Ultimately, I used a combination of data and my own judgment to make these picks. I’m confident these recommendations will be a reliable way to learn about LaTeX.
Fabio revised the latest version of this article.
