Here are some tutorials I have written for getting up to speed with this excellent document processing system. Funnily enough I wouldn't consider myself an expert, per se, but I'm learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I started to learn LaTeX, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experience plays to your advantage because I cover sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning LaTeX which are probably typical for most beginners.
Benefits
LaTeX pre-dates modern graphical word processors, if not modern graphical operating systems! How can something so archaic be any good? Well it turns out it was well designed and ahead of its time, which is why it's still popular today. First and foremost the quality of the documents is far superior to word processors. The separation of content and style is in fact quite liberating and makes for simpler writing: you can concentrate on content. And for large documents with lots of cross-references, bibliographies/citations and figures, you'll wonder how you ever put up with word processors!
For a more detailed account, see my article regarding the numerous advantages.
