First off, this book is great and up-to-date expansion of the 1st edition, but I'll agree with some other posters who maintain that the book is difficult to navigate... unless you already have a pretty good idea of what you are looking for. It contains clear descriptions and short examples for nearly every topic discussed, but very few longer examples. This book is definitely not for those that have never used LaTeX and are trying to learn the basics for the first time and/or want lots of long, complete, and well commented examples.

To be fair, that's not what this book is about. It is definitely targeted at those with at least some LaTeX experience. However, it would be a 5 star book with the simple addition of separate indexes for "commands" and "concepts" (which are combined into one 96 page index) and the addition of a few pages devoted to a basic "getting started" chapter with some longer and complete document examples.

That being said; there are a number of very good online "getting started" materials available (and/or linked) from the authors web site as well as from numerous other web sites and user groups. It would just be nice to have some of those materials included in the text for completeness. However, once the basics are learned, I don't think there is anything LaTeX related that I would ever need that's missing from this text (aside from some brief coverage of metafont/metapost perhaps -- just in an appendix or something -- but I know that's probably getting way out scope).

I think this book is a great supplement to Leslie Lamport's manual. It has plenty of historical information about the development of fonts and types and also the macros for problem situations such as long tables or horizontal tables. I sincerely believe it will help the latex programmers learn to customize their style files and produce even greater looking documents.

This book includes everything on what you're likely going to use LaTeX for. I'd definitely recommend it - even if you already have the first edition.