\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\input{preamble.tex}

\begin{document}
\lecture{2}         %% Write lecture nubmer.
{Rafail Ostrovsky}  %% Prof name.
{September 29, 2008}            %% Todya's date
{prepared by Zaphod Beeblebrox }  %% Write your name
{Handout 2: Using LaTeX}          %% Topic

Some useful links to learn LaTeX are:
\begin{itemize}
\item {\sf http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/}
(lots of tutorials here)
\item {\sf http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/} (MIT tutorial)
\item {\sf http://www.tug.org/tutorials/tugindia/}
\newline
(one of the tutorials)
\end{itemize}

In addition, we will use preabmle.tex file. So generally, start with:

\begin{verbatim}
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\input{preamble.tex}
\begin{document}
\end{verbatim}

This will allow you to use the preabmle.tex package.
The first thing you should put after that  is the {\em header},
produced as follows:
\begin{verbatim}
\lecture{2}{Rafail Ostrosky}{September 29, 2008}{Joe Scriber}
\end{verbatim}
This will produce:
\lecture{2}{Rafail Ostrosky}{April 29, 2008}{Joe Scriber}

Of course, you should modify lecture number (here it is $2$),
Date, and your name.
To see what the header.tex allows you to do, look at
the
\begin{verbatim}
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/TEACHING/SPRING-2008/HowToUsePreamble.pdf\end{verbatim}
file, prepared by Robert J. Ragno.
\end{document}