97 private links
Here are some tutorials I have written for getting up to speed with this excellent document processing system. Funnily enough I wouldn't consider myself an expert, per se, but I'm learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I started to learn LaTeX, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experience plays to your advantage because I cover sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning LaTeX which are probably typical for most beginners.
The memoir class (a superset of book, report and article classes) provides a variety of what I called "page notes", which include footenotes, either at the page bottom or in the margin, or unnumbered notes in the margin which can extend for over multiple pages.
When using the article option memoir treats \chapter as \section, and \subsection as \section. and so on, so that a document initially written like a book can be typeset as an article. This was the initial idea for an easy conversion from book/report to article.