Rating: 
Summary: Very informative book
Review: This short book gives a lot of advices that should be carefully considered for all budding scientists. Of course, if you are a tenured university professor, this might not be the book for you -- but it might be valuable to your students. My current academic status is a graduate student in biophysics. I am a weighing my options of either going to industry or academia after graduation. This book has given me a lot of worthwhile suggestions. There are certainly some factors that I haven't even considered until I read this book. The book also taught me a lot of 'survival skills' that I should start practicing. I believe that a lot of my peers are going through graduate school with ignorance on skills that are not directly related to physics, such as presentation skills, publishing and writing skills, and communication skills. These are probably more important in finding a secure job than a high IQ brain. One of the main goal of this book is to help us consider the ingredients needed for a secure and stable scientific career. I believe this will save some of us a lot of headaches in the future. For negatives, I believe that the author tries to assume that we (the audience) are all high caliber students and postdocs. I definitely don't consider myself someone who will make any major contribution to science, or being capable of publishing 1 paper every year or so. I don't know if I can even produce 1 publication within my entire graduate career. Furthermore, I really wish there were more in-depth discussion on finding the right mentor in the academic and industrial world. Despite the cons, I still think this book should be read by all serious researchers.
Rating: 
Summary: Even if you think you know all this...
Review: You'll find a lot of valuable advice in this book even if you think you already know all these things. I was at first skeptical that something new for me would emerge from this tiny book (especially after having attended many seminars on topics discussed in the book), yet in many cases I felt that what I read did strengthen my understanding of the processes and tradeoffs involved in selecting an advisor/mentor, making a career choice (industry vs. academia), writing a grant proposal, etc.
If you are on the verge of such an important step in your professional life and decide to save yourself the $10 or so that the book costs, you are truly shortchanging yourself.
If nothing else, read the book at the library -- it would take you 2-3 hours, but the results will be a lifetime's worth!
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