This is an evolving list of Web resources for Ph.D. students. There is a wealth of information on the Web. If you think any of this should be added to the list, or if you'd recommend removing some items from the list, send me mail at ramesh@usc.edu.

Career Advice

• How to Succeed in Graduate School Marie DesJardin's monograph discusses the various stages of a graduate student's career. It also has some advice for advisors!
• Networking on the Network: Good advice on how to join the community, and build contacts.
• How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab is another collection of advice on research methodology and skills.
• Dave Patterson's "How to have a Bad Research Career" talk: While this is mostly advice for junior faculty, it does frame the way you should be thinking about your research.
• Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers is a resource for when you've decided on a career in academia and want to develop some skills.
• The Computing Research Association's Workshop on Academic Careers is another similar resource.
• You and Your Research, Richard Hamming's observations on research. (Thanks to Eric Coe for this link).

Writing Skills

• Elements of Style Strunk and White's classic book on writing, a MUST read for any Ph.D. student. In fact, I'd recommend re-reading this book once a year.
• Mathematical Writing This is a neat collection of do's and don'ts for technical writing, with special emphasis on mathematical writing.
• Ed Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information. A wonderful discussion of the principles of graphical presentation of data, a must for every systems Ph.D. student.
• Writing Systems and Networking Articles. A comprehensive writing guide with pointers to other literature on the subject.

Presentation Skills

• Presentation Skills. This is a list of pointers to resources for effective oral communication.
• Another list of pointers to presentation advice
• Ed Tufte's Advice on Presentations. Make this second nature! Also see a variant of this list.

Critical Reading

• Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology: A very succinct description of a methodology for reading scientific papers. Re-read this frequently until the methodology becomes second nature.
• Sugih Jamin's checklist for paper reading A set of questions you should be asking while reading a systems paper

Reviewing Papers

• The Task of the Referee Alan J. Smith's classic monograph on the responsibilities of a computer science reviewer. This paper also has some pointers to other literature on the subject, some of which I have collected below.
• A Guide for New Referees in Theoretical Computer Science: Ian Parberry's guide is useful as a general guide for reviewers, despite its title.

Writing Code

• The GNU Coding Standards. A description of the GNU standard coding style for C. Highly recommended. There are other C coding styles (such as K&R), so you should feel free to pick the one you like.
• The Perl Style Manual. Coding styles for Perl scripts.
• The Ellemtel C++ Style Manual. A coding standard for C++. There are many such. Feel free to use any you like.