This is a guest blog post by Joseph Wright, creator of the learnlatex.org site. Joseph is also author of the Some TeX Developments blog, member of the LaTeX Project and active contributor on TeX StackExchange.
Introduction
LaTeX is a great system for producing technical documents, but as it is not a word processor, there is an entry barrier. In many ways, learning LaTeX is like learning a 'real' programming language: we have input ('code') and run ('compile') to get output. It's not surprising, therefore, that we might look at how people learn those 'real' programming languages and want to provide similar tools. A quick search will show that while books remain important resources, interactive web-based training is the first contact many users have with a whole range of programming tools. The learnlatex.org project was born out of the desire to provide the same easy-to-access approach for LaTeX beginners.