Information Retrieval (study) resources

If you're looking for a way of getting to know the background of IR, there's a plethora of options (online) available. From the classic book by Keith van Rijsbergen (1979), the upcoming IR book by Manning and Schuetze (who previously wrote the classic "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing") to various lecture pages of IR courses taught around the world. For example, David Carmel's course page at Haifa, James Allen's course page at UMass, Jamie Callan's course page at CMU, or ofcourse the course taught by Maarten de Rijke (which is more general and centered around "internet information").

Robin's advice

Here's a nice post from Robin Aly (doing his PhD at the Univ. of Twente): http://robin-twente.blogspot.com/2008/02/lessons-learned.html

Lectures on "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business"

This lecture series on search ran at UC Berkeley in fall 2005. Although some of the material may already be out of date and generally doesn't go very deep, it's still a good (broad) overview of topics related to search and provides insights from different perspectives. They got some people from industry and the videos of the lectures are good quality.

Here's the course schedule with links to individual lectures: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is141/f05/schedule.html

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace

My thesis adviser insisted that I read this book and it turned out extremely helpful. Joseph Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" demystifies the process of writing clearly and provides exercises and ideas that help improve your writing no matter how well (or not) you write right now.

Focus of the book is the question of what makes a sentence easy or hard to read. Only a small part of the answer relates to grammatical correctness. The larger part of the book discusses ideas such as cohesion, coherence, and emphasis, how these can be assessed, and how sentences can be rewritten to communicate ideas clearly.

There are many editions of this book. At some point it was split up into three different books: "Style: (Ten) Lessons in Clarity and Grace", "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace", and "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". I have the fifth edition of the first one, which can be bought used on amazon.com or half.com. I'm not sure how the other two relate to this one.