[texhax] tex

[Karl Berry]

      > 2. Does it matter to know tex well if I want to develop new
      > packages? 

It certainly does.

      If it does could you tell me what is the best book,
      help, documentation for tex (particularly free resources)?

Besides the TeXbook (non-free as Reinhard said), there is TeX for the
Impatient (http://tug.org/ftp/impatient), which is free.  But it only
covers plain TeX.  Since your message is talking about LaTeX, I doubt
either will be much help.  In general, there is depressingly little
information available on writing LaTeX packages (that I'm aware of).  I
found Scott Pakin's dtxtut tutorial (on CTAN) to be the most practical.

A list of intro resources is at http://tug.org/begin.html, and a longer
list at http://tug.org/interest.html.

    Are you sure that latex or context do not already provide what you
    need?

I echo Reinhard here ... latex and context have had many, many, years of
development ...

Best,
karl