LaTeX is large, ancient and complicated. It's something of a rabbit hole since there is so much to learn.
LaTeX Tools
- BibTeX is a way to automatically insert properly formatted citations and references into papers. It uses a central file that only requires you to enter the reference once.
Beamer makes excellent slides and supposedly can also make handouts and outlines from the same source. If you need animation then you will need Powerpoint or Keynote, though. MarkusDickinson made has an IU Comp Ling style sheet he uses for class slides (with associated IU block logo.
There should exist stylesheets for almost any journal in existence. The most common ones around here are ACL, APA and LSA. You can find the beginnings of a style sheet collection at Nathan's darcs repository. It has ACL (for 2007), LSA, but APA is inexplicably missing.
Emacs has good support for LaTeX and BibTeX editing, and JoshHerring has written some scripts to automate the LaTeX edit/compile/view cycle in vim. If you prefer an integrated program, TeXShop might also be worth a look.
Remember that you don't have to use LaTeX for everything. You can always generate a beautiful PDF equation in LaTeX and paste it into some other document. You can also include a diagram from some other program into your LaTeX document.
LaTeX for Dissertations
There are a couple of style sheets for writing dissertations that follow the IU formatting guidelines.
IU Thesis Document Class (current as of 1999)
IU Thesis Style Sheet (updated last year)