How to write a thesis...

During the year of my thesis i learned a lot about text formating and graphic editing. Some points i would like to present here.

latex

once one has installed latex, its a very comfortable tool for formating large texts. useful packages are the komascripts, which are for formating a text. e.g. a letter is very easily and elegantly designed with it, even writing a whole book is no problem at all.
a german introduction to writing a thesis in latex can be found here. its quite elaborated and gives a lot of useful hints to basic stuff like file management.
a lot of guides can be found on the official website.
for mathematical typesetting one needs the amsmath package, a short math guide of possible symbols and environments is always handy.
for sketches or small graphics the tiks and pgf package has proven useful. The graphics are elegant and easily designed.
for the special purpose of drawing quantum computing circuits, the package Qcircuits has been designed.
and of course one should always use the beamer package for presentations. the slides look nice, what ever you put in them :-)
an exhaustive introduction to graphics in latex, can be found under this link.

gnuplot

Gnuplot has a lot of possibilities to present data or plot functions, especially for 3D data. Here you can find a nice not-so FAQ.

xmgrace

a multitude of functions for 2D plots is given by the xmgrace program. once shell based it now has a GUI and is easily useable.