Rating: 
Summary: 95% of the reviews are unfortunately not relevant
Review: As one of the authors of of this book (first and second edition) I'm somewhat annoyed to find that suddenly the existing reviews to the second edition (2 with 5 stars) have vanished and instead been replaced by 18 reviews to the first edition (which is 10 years old) + 1 that seems to be for the second edition.
However only for 2 or 3 of them Amazon actually notes that fact, ie for most of them you can only deduce it by comparing the publishing date of the edition (April 2004) with the dates of the reviews.
While most of them are favorable, I do think this is not helping anybody as the books has changed far too much. To give you some overview here: about 90% of the original book has been rewritten due to the fact that in 10 years software changes :-) In addition due to the amount of good new material in the LaTeX community the book was extended from 550 pages to 1120, ie, more than doubled in size. Also one of the negative remarks in the reviews for the first edition (bad index) was explicitly addressed by producing the index together with a professional indexer.
Finally one point (not mentioned in the first edition's reviews) has been addressed: the ready to run examples (nearly 1000) are now 100% accurate, ie the output shown has be automatically compiled from the input as shown in the book, so you see precisely how solutions will come out after processing and not how authors believe how they come out.
I hope that Amazon rectifies this problem and puts the new reviews back on and removes the old ones or at least marks them correctly as referring to an out-of-print version. Until then I urge everbody to read those reviews with the above understanding in mind. --- clearly new reviews from readers of the second edition would also be helpful. (ps, yes i rated it 5 stars even though i'm the author, a) to get your attention and b) as it replaces the reviews already being there before and c) because I honestly believe that it is much better than the first edition)
When I first wrote this review I forgot to mention that you can preview the TOC, full chapter 3, and the index in pdf format at:
http://www.latex-project.org/guides
Rating: 
Summary: Yep, you'll need this one too.
Review: Everyone seems to recommends this as a "second" or companion LaTeX book following the purchase of Lamport's guide. Buying these two books and trying to learn LaTeX is like trying to learn a foreign language from that language's physics texts--you'll be exasperated in no time. Anyway, this book lists many of the text massaging add-on packages to LaTeX available via download from CTAN. For that use, it's great. (Without reading this book, I probably would never have figured out that the easiest way to indent the first paragraph after the section heading is simply to use the "indentfirst" package.) You'll find a lot of packages that you'll need instantly and probably many more that you will just chuckle about as you read the commands. ("Hey, lookee here at this mini table of contents for-each-chapter package. It's probably a pain in the butt to learn... .)You will eventually need this book even if you are a rank LaTeX novice so you might as well buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: Finally here - GET YOURS TODAY
Review: I have been a TeX/LaTeX user since 1982, and have authored several classes and styles (newlfm). I just got my copy of the new The LaTeX Companion (2nd Edition). I just love it!! Why? 942 pages of text, 94 pages of the index (YEP!), wonderfully clear examples, 136 pages on fonts, a whole appendix on debugging, 72 pp on mathematics, etc. The book is well-written and uses clearly distinct fonts for user commands, internal commands, etc. There are 138 pages about fonts. In the mathematics chapter, there are 104 examples in the Math chapter alone; one REALLY COOL section shows 10 different font choices and their impact on the typesetting of a small page of mathematics. HOT STUFF!! In short, there is only 1 limitation to the book: It does not have LaTeX/TeX lion on the front. That is hard to accept. However, everything else is really good. I highly recommend this.
Rating:
Summary: Good LaTeX reference
Review: I have been using LaTeX for a few years now, but there always seem to be things that I don't know how to do (use the wingdings font) or can't get to look quite right (complex, multicolumn tables). I have some other LaTeX reference books that have helped, but this one seems to better than the rest. I really like the way the examples are presented. The examples are complete and very easy to use. I sometimes have a hard time finding exactly what I want via the index, but the index tends to at least put me in the right ballpark.
The book does cover the basics of vanilla LaTeX, but it also does a very good job of talking about the important CTAN packages. I think this is a good move as the authors have decided to present things in the simplest way even if it means using a 3rd party package. I generally don't want to spend time searching for a good CTAN package, but here the authors have done this work for me. It is nice.
I would have liked to see a bit more about LaTeX graphics in this book, but I guess that is what The LaTeX Graphics Companion is for. Can we get an update to that book?
Rating:
Summary: A necessary part of every LaTeX user's library.
Review: If you use LaTeX --- and if you want to create nice looking documents you probably should --- then you'll want this book.
This book is well organized and well written. The information is presented very clearly and with many examples. While it is fun to browse through, it is also easy to find any specific information that you're looking for. And any information on LaTeX that you want will almost certainly be in here; the book is quite comprehensive. I had expected the book to cost much more than it does, particularly given how much it covers; I was pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive it is. While it isn't a tutorial for someone who's never used LaTeX before, anyone who uses LaTeX for non-trivial documents will find themselves leafing through this book
Rating:
Summary: (Almost) everything you want
Review: My personal favorite. I have been using both the German and the English version of this boock since 1996, and I just love it. Granted, the world has moved on, and many things about LaTeX have changed and still are, and yet, there is so much information in this book. I only hope the authors soon prepare an updated version including the latest developments.
Rating:
Summary: A True Companion
Review: Pocket Review: *The* bible to keep on your desk if you use LaTex.
I love type. Ever since I got into computers, back when high resolution was a 132 column printer, I've tried to find ways to play with typesetting and fonts. I wrote a basic layout system in OMSI Pascal that drove daisywheel printers. I got to be quite an expert at nroff and troff. I used to hunt (without success) for a free copy of Scribe. I played with Lout, and a dozen other packages. But nothing, ever, held a candle to TeX when it comes to the quality of the output it produces.
Ignore for the moment some of the uglier fonts than some TeX users employ, and look instead at the pages. Hold them up at a distance and admire the uniformity of the gray: no rivers of white to be seen. Look at the bottoms of the page: if the typesetter didn't totally goof off, they'll be vertically balanced: an open spread is
the same height on both pages (TeX'll add tiny amounts of leading to make it happen). Dig into the line-breaking, and you'll find optimization algorithms, which shuffle words back and forth trying to minimize the <em>badness</em> of the appearance.
The output of TeX gives me a lot of pleasure.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its input. Don Knuth is clearly a genius, but as with all wizards, his creations can be tricky. In the case of TeX, we have a typesetting engine driven by a macro processor whose interpretation of syntax can be changed while it is in the middle of processing individual commands. Raw TeX is scary to deal with, so people don't deal with it. Instead, they use its power to write macro packages, abstracting the low level commands into something more palatable (and tractable). The most widely used of these is Leslie Lamport's LaTeX. LaTeX is at its heart a logical mark up system, documented in an admirably short and lucid book, <em>LaTeX: A Document Preparation System.</em>
But when you want to use LaTeX to do serious work, you need more than this small book. When you want to set complex tables, or handle floating material a certain way, or get your index looking just right, you need the real scoop. And you turn to just one book.
The original <em>LaTeX Companion</em> was one of those books that never got returned to my bookshelf. I used it almost every day for 4 years during the typesetting of five books. Thanks to its wealth of detail, I was able to create press-ready files straight from my computer to the exacting specification of the production departments of three separate printers.
But now, that worn old book has been retired. Mittlebach and Goossens have
produced a second edition of <em>The LaTeX Companion,</em> and it's better in every possible way. In the ten years since the first was published, a lot has changed, and the book captures it all. New packages, improvements in encodings, font handling, xindy: the book describes it all. My copy arrived a couple of weeks before
Mike Clark's <em>Pragmatic Project Automation</em> book was due to go to the printers. I devoured it, and immediately used its advice to improve the appearance of ragged-right text, fix up some font issues in the code listings, and improve the handling of included graphics. Since then, it's been a true companion as I've worked with the typesetting of the new edition of <em>Programming Ruby</em>.
I don't often gush, but if you use LaTeX, or if you'd just like to produce great looking typeset output, you owe it to yourself to get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Advanced LATEX guide
Review: The companion to the book "LATEX" by Leslie Ramport. Many topics which are not or only sparely covered in Leslie Ramports book, are here dealt with in depth and with creat clarity. It contains a lot of examples with both, LATEX code and how it would look printed. It contains the following chapters: 1.) Introduction, 2.) The Structure of a LATEX Document, 3.) Basic Formatting Tools, 4.) The Layout of the Page, 5.) Tabular Material, 6.) Mastering Floats, 7.) Font Selection 8.) Higher Mathematics, 9.) LATEX in a Multilingual Environment, 10.) Portable Graphics in LATEX, 11.) Using PostScript, 12.) Index Generation, 13.) Bibliography Generation, 14.) LATEX Package File Documentation Tools, A.) A LATEX Overview for Package and Class Writers, B.) TEX Archive Sites.
Rating:
Summary: Review of *Current* Edition (the second edition)
Review: The second edition of The LaTeX Companion is a thorough rewrite of the first edition. If you're seeking a single source for improving your LaTeX documents (in ways you never imagined), this is your book. It is really a tour de force in technical documentation and clearly a labor of love from its numerous authors. The extensive coverage of packages and the examples are very useful. In addition, every example is provided in the CD that comes with the manual. The CD also includes a complete LaTeX installation. You will not find a better text for working with LaTeX and I highly recommend it.
PS I've been using LaTeX since 1990 and am familiar with all the principal manuals.
Rating: 
Summary: useless as reference
Review: This book is pretty much useless as a reference. I bought this book as a reference for my next big document (I'm using LaTeX for some 8 years). Unfortunately I found that the index in this book is virtually useless. Yes, it does refer you to pages in the text that contain the word you are looking for, but that's as far as it goes.
"Explanations" that I did find are generally anything but intuitive, often enough sections never truly deal with what the headline suggests. One star for the examples, that I use as a guide. But generally this book keeps the wood of my shelf from fading.
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