This essay is based on notes from a lecture I gave at Stanford in 1999. That lecture was easily the most popular one of the course and several people encouraged me to put the ideas on-line.
The idea behind the lecture was to provide very basic information that the average computer science student needs, and that my friends and I found that we were not given by the time we had graduated from college. Some of the advice here is from my own experience, but a lot is also from the experience of friends, several of whom kindly shared advice they wished they’d gotten earlier.
