A busy tutorial, mainly because formatting is such a broad topic. LaTeX is so flexible that I actually only skimmed the surface, as you ca have much more control over the presentation of your document if you wish. One of the purposes of LaTeX is to take away the stress of having to deal with the physical presentation yourself, so you need not get too carried away!

Floats are containers for things in a document that cannot be broken over a page. LaTeX by default recognizes "table" and "figure" floats, but you can define new ones of your own (see Custom floats below). Floats are there to deal with the problem of the object that won't fit on the present page, and to help when you really don't want the object here just now.

TeX Live is an easy way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world.

Kile is an integrated LATEX environment for the KDE desktop. Kile gives you the ability to use all the functionalities of LATEX in a graphical interface, giving you easy, immediate, and customized access to all programs for LATEX code-completion, compiling, postprocessing, debugging, conversion and viewing tools; you also get very handy wizards, a LATEX reference and a powerful project management.

I have gathered here a list of templates that can be of some interest for graduate or undergraduate students, faculty members, and everybody who needs to write anything in general.