So, my ELEC170 unit at university requires me to use LaTeX. To describe it in one line, LaTeX is a document preparation system.
It really is what HTML could have been. If only Tim Berners-Lee sent Donald Knuth a quick email saying "hey, I got this great idea, and you've already done most of the legwork, can you just add hyperlinks?" But instead, he re-invented the wheel.
Getting started with LaTeX can be a bitch, if you don't have much help, but there are a truckload of resources out there including TUG, CTAN and a variety of university professors, students and researchers, who like me try to help out other people like you, or even me still.
Basically, LaTeX comes from a language (similar to HTML in concept, but reasonably different under the hood) called TeX (pronounced "tech", LaTeX is pronounced "Lay-tech"). You use it to put a document together by editing codes to control how you want the document to appear. Because of the widespread use of HTML, LaTeX is now generally only used in academia and technical organisations, and publishing houses.
ELEC and ENGG (and probably other Faculty of Science units) at MQ generally want us to write reports using an IEEE "package" called IEEEtran. This package provides the document structure and formatting. IEEEtran tells LaTeX to divide your document up into two columns. It also gives you some nifty commands so you can make BIG first captial letters of a word to start off a paragraph, places the headings, titles and document headers on each page.
Use a plain old text editor to get started. Notepad springs to mind, but it's crap. Try Notepad++ or my favourite ConText on Windows. Kate or KWrite that ship with most KDE based Linux distributions should be OK. For Mac OS X Users, give BBEdit or it's free counterpart TextWrangler a go. This will get you on your way to editing a TeX document, but you'll still need a way to convert this to your final output. There are quite a few packages out there to do this, but the easiest one I found was MikTeX for Windows. I'm not really sure about Apple or Linux users; but I'm sure it won't be hard to find something out there for you.
One of the key things that I felt wasn't explained to me is that your source file needs to be compiled before you can browse it.