A few tips 

Writing a paper
  1. Three sins of authors in computer science and math, by Jonathan Shewchuk.
  2. How to get your papers accepted, by Matt Welsh.
Giving a talk
  1. Giving technical talks, by Scot Drysdale.
Latex tricks
  1. Create beautiful figures 
    1. Use xfig. For windows users, you can install cygwin, remember to check the box for graphics, and X-windows packages.
    2. Import to pstex, pstex_t files. And you can use the following code to include the figure to latex file.
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\begin{center}
\scalebox{1.0}{\input{yourfigure.pstex_t}}
\caption{CAPTION}\label{LABEL}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
    1. Make use of the snap rounding feature of xfig. Make use of the different depth to create background and foreground.
    2. Never use too many colors in one figure. Create black and white figures if you can.
  1. Embed fonts in pdf files
Use latex to generate dvi file.

Then run

dvips -Ppdf -G0 -t letter -o paper.ps paper.dvi Then run ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 paper.ps paper.pdf

  1. Siggraph has a nice tutorial on many latex tricks.