Anyway... after reading a couple chapters detailing the intricacies of different dashes in TeX and adding emphasis to words, I became terribly bored and just wanted to try something out. The quadratic formula part is, for the most part, shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia's TeX entry.
Obviously I still have a lot to learn but there it's definitely a lot easier to learn things just by doing. A short summary of what I've learned and tried so far:
-Every document begins by defining what kind of document you're typesetting. I just used /documentclass{article} because that's what's in all the examples and I haven't explored the other options yet.
-You must add \begin{document}. You can add other things between these two commands but I don't know about them yet!
-$ and $$ set off formulas
-Bold and italics can be incorporated as follows: \itemphasis\rm or \bf{emphasis} with it being italics, bf being bold font and \rm being a closing tag meaning roman font
-As described in the sample, one should be conscious of dashes and hyphens. One hyphen(-) will produce a simple hyphen (for hyphenated words), two (--) will produce an en dash suitable for ranges, three (---) will produce an en dash for punctuation to represent a break in thought, and a hyphen inside a formula will produce a minus sign (use $-$).
-LaTeX will automatically adjust the spacing, so I added some errant spacing to observe this effect
-This introduced me to a few commands used in formulas like the square root (\sqrt) and how to represent fractions (\over).
This was the result:
