Our definitions of impatience are divergent

TeX for the impatient is a 300+ page PDF that doesn’t give you any idea how to install the program or even use it if you’re not on a *nix system. My tutorial is about 15 pages, it tells Windows and Mac users exactly where to download the needed programs, how to install them, how to use a frontend to create and process LaTeX documents, and everything else they need to know to make 80% of documents, referring them to search engines for the remaining 20%.

A lot of tutorials are like that, sadly. And they discourage learning. I think a good tutorial should be readable in about 20 minutes and serve two purposes: teach the basics and show how to go beyond them.

That’s what I went for in my tutorial. It briefly discusses what LaTeX is and how it works, then it shows in detail where to get it, how to install it, and how to get up and running, since newcomers will have no idea how to do any of those things if they aren’t Linux users. Then it covers the most common needs of technical writers: front matter, paragraphs, lists, tables, figures, annotations and equations. Along the way, it introduces packages (which vastly extend LaTeX’s capabilities, but are too numerous to quickly document) and special commands, clearly showing where more information can be obtained as users’ needs mature.

I think the advantage of short tutorials is that they make the task of learning a new system less daunting. You get the basics early on, you feel confident making most documents, and you aren’t overwhelmed with every little detail. That confidence makes you more likely to go on to learn the advanced functions as you need them.