About LaTeX
First things first: contrary to what you might expect based on the spelling of the name, LaTeX is actually pronounced like "lay" and then "tech" - not like the word that describes the rubbery stuff. (You're supposed to pronounce the 'X' as you would pronounce the Greek letter Chi.)
LaTeX is a markup language and document preparation system for typesetting math, science and engineering. It's ultimately based on the TeX system developed by Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth, although these days most people use LaTeX rather than TeX (which most people consider much harder to use effectively). LaTeX makes a lot of typesetting easier, since it automatically takes care of most layout issues, along with equation numbering, cross references, figures, and tables. It's also the standard system for writing technical papers of all kinds, so it's especially worth knowing if you want to do any kind of grad school whatsoever. Even if you're not thinking grad school is for you, there's a decent chance that as an engineer you will come across LaTeX at some point (if you haven't already).
Resources for Learning LaTeX
Of course a Google search for LaTeX will turn up a bunch of great resources for learning LaTeX. Beyond that, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network has a great page for starting with LaTeX here. In particular pay attention to the comprehensive list of symbols under step two on that page. A more comprehensive resource and tutorial is the "(Not So) Short Guide to LaTeX2e", which you can also find under documentation on the starter page at CTAN. CTAN has a lot of great stuff, so browsing through its pages probably couldn't hurt.
Honestly, though, the easiest thing to do to get the hang of LaTeX is just to start using it. To show you how to do it, check out the next section:
Compiling An Example
To show you how you can use LaTeX to improve the appearance of your work and to typeset mathematics, here is an example LaTeX source file. The comments in that file explain how you go about creating a LaTeX file. The end result is a pdf file here.
Incidentally, in addition to showing you how to use LaTeX, the document itself introduces a technique called "generating functions" for solving recurrences. It is sometimes much easier to use this technique than any other, and is kinda fun at the same time.
To convert from the .tex version of the file to the .pdf version, here's what you do (assuming you're working on a computer that has LaTeX installed on it).
first you execute:
latex example.tex
This will create a bunch of files with the same name but different extensions as your input file. The one that you reall care about is the one named "example.dvi". The "dvi" stands for "device independent format," and it's not really meant for human consumption. To convert it to a pdf you would execute the command:
dvipdf example.dvi
and you then will have your pdf. It really is that easy.