LaTeX, Bread and Butter

That's how my Facebook twitter sounded like a couple of days ago. And yes, it was actually like that, except the bread and butter part, of course. Not that I would have minded them, it's just that I am more like a "coffee with milk & a banana" type of person.
So, yes, about two weeks ago I slowly started to migrate my work from Scientific Workplace and Word to LaTeX. Initially I tried to get support from people here at RPI, but they all seem to have magically disappeared and to this day, I only exchanged a couple of emails with a person that was nice enough to care. Of course, no help there.However, motivated by whoknowswhat I started to dwell in to it myself and look for online resources to deal with it. There are some nice websites (just google your question) that will get you a long way but in my case, just like yours, I suspect, the problem is the actual understanding of how LaTeX really works. Like the fact that &, % or _,are not accepted in a sentence unless they're treated as special characters or in math mode. Various stuff like that I would have liked to learn from somebody rather than searching the web and applying the old try& fail techniques. Oh, well, now it doesn't matter. 150 pages of nice LaTeX output awaits to be defended, printed and deposited in the library. I almost forgot all the trouble that I went through just to insert some graphicx or tables in my thesis. And two weeks is not a bad performance at all considering the slope of the learning curve involved:)