I am someone who has been trying to pivot into having a tech job. I have used LaTex before as a student and there is a job I am trying to take that uses Jaspersoft to make reports. Is jasper similar to LaTeX? Are there resources you found particularly helpful?
I am currently still looking to get my install, hello world, and combing their site.
Consider to take look on http://intive-fdv.github.io/DynamicJasper/ It is more code friendly Jasper wrapper to provide reports. Plain jasper is very XML heavy and you will end in wrapping it in some template engine at some point to reduce repetition. Otherwise download the Jasper Report studio crate simple reports and play around. There are maven and gradle build plugins that compile reports during the build and then you can work with compiled versions.
Jasper by itself is not a bad technology and work quite good for designing reports.