Writing your dissertation

Writing a dissertation seems to be a frightening and terrifying process of documenting a years of technical research work in just a bunch of papers. Well, honestly it is frightening and terrifying but if we could consider previous experiences and share ours we could make it easier and may be you could enjoy it.

I would like to share with all of you my experience in writing my dissertation, hoping that it might help and support you too.

Before I go through my recommendations and suggestions. I would recommend you to read those two links about "How to write your dissertation". The first link is written by Prof. Chinneckand the second link is written by Prof. Zappe. Please, read them carefully.

http://www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/chinneck/thesis.html

http://infoscreen2.phpnow.de/misc/How%20to%20write%20a%20thesis.pdf

I will try to make it easy and straight forward. Before I start writing my dissertation I started with a planning phase which took about one and half month. It seems to be a long period of time, but it definitely worth it. My first step was by declaring all the resources which I will need during the writing process. I classified the resources to four main categories, as followed:

• Backup
• Word processor and Editor
• Management and planning tools
• Editing and drawing tools
• Dictionary

Obviously, I am using Ubuntu Linux operating system but I might have some recommendation for MS Windows users too.

1. Backup tools

• Online backup

Dropbox (Linux and Windows) www.dropbox.com

iDrive (Windows) www.idrive.com

• External hard disk

sync -avzurC sourceFolder destinationFolder (Linux command)

• USB stick

2. Word processor and Editor tools

• Latex (MikTex for Windows, TexLive for Linux)

http://miktex.org/2.9/setup

http://www.tug.org/texlive/

sudo apt-get install texlive-full

sudo apt-get install tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-latex-base

• Editor (TexMaker or Kilefor Linux, TexMaker or WinEdt for Windows)

http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

http://www.winedt.com/

sudo apt-get install kile

3. Management and planning tools

• MS Project (Windows)

Used for time (Gantt chart) and resources management

• Planner (Linux)

Used for time (Gantt chart) and resources management

http://live.gnome.org/Planner/Downloads

sudo apt-get install planner

• xMind, FreeMind (Linux and Windows)

Used for Mind mapping

http://www.xmind.net/

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

• Osmo (Linux)

Used as personal organizer

4. Editing and drawing tools

• CorelDraw

5. Dictionary

• English <> Arabic

http://qamoos.sakhr.com/

• English <> German

http://dict.leo.org/

• English <> English

http://thesaurus.com/