------Document titles
LaTeX offers some logical markup for the title of documents: three commands to set up 'meta-data' and one to use it.
As you can see, the commands \author, \title and \date save information, and \maketitle uses it. You can also separate multiple authors with \and. The commands \author, \title and \date need to come before \maketitle. Here, we've given them in the document body: they can also be used in the preamble, but if you use babel shortcuts they won't be active there.
The design provided by \maketitle depends on the document class (see lesson 5). There is a titlepage environment for when you want to do custom design, but this is out of the scope of this introduction. If you want to do your own document designs you can either use a customisable class, such as memoir, or start with one of LaTeX's base classes, like book and use it as a starting point.
Descriptive lists
In addition to the "ordered" and "unordered" types of lists, LaTeX provides another one, less common: the "descriptive lists".
Exercises
Try setting up different \author, \title and \date information to test out \maketitle. Which of them do you have to give? Do the commands have to have an author, a title and a date in them?
Make some descriptive lists, and nest some of them inside another ones (ordered, unordered or descriptive).