Peter Bailis :: Highly Available, Seldom Consistent

A Running List: Writing, Speaking, and Research Advice

17 Mar 2012

This is a growing list of other people’s advice that I’ve found useful, posted here mostly for my own reference. (As if there weren’t enough of these already.)

On Writing

• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
  tl;dr: A classic on good prose and English writing.

• Pet Peeves for Writing by Margo Seltzer
  tl;dr: Read it. It’s short. Don’t do these things.

• LaTeX Usage Notes by Eddie Kohler
  tl;dr: A (beautifully typeset) document on proper LaTeX formatting, typography, and writing tips.

• Shell Scripts for Editing by Matt Might
  tl;dr: Automatically highlight passive voice, weasel words, and lexical illusions using these scripts. (Also good) Thanks to Colin Scott and Shaddi Hasan.

On Speaking

• Slide Design for Developers by Zach Holman
  tl;dr: Practical tips for making your slides better: use color and huge fonts, and treat your slides as prop, not as a crutch.

• The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte
  tl;dr: Tufte provides many examples of how not to make slides, and his perspective on the “projector operating system” is valuable.

On Research

• You and Your Research by Edward Hamming
  tl;dr: How to ask the right questions and scope your research for maximum impact by a guy who did both.

• Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman
  tl;dr: Don’t let PR, hype, or zeitgeist interfere with real science.

• How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia by Dave Patterson
  tl;dr: Good advice on pitfalls of graduate school/academia and how to avoid them.

• Software is not science by Matt Welsh
  tl;dr: Systems research is about principles, not artifacts.

• Database Metatheory: Asking the Big Queries by Christos Papadimitriou
  tl;dr: An awesome reflection on theory versus practice by one of the great CS theoreticians.

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