Staying up to date
                                                                
Staying up to date
Books are out of date even before they are published, so you need to top up what they say with more recent information. The Web sites of the main business dailies, such as Wall Street Journal (if you subscribe), Financial Times, Handelsbaltt (in German only these days) and Nikkei AsiaBiztech, are excellent sources for this. They provide most of the content of their paper editions and have easily reached sections devoted to computing topics.
There is also useful commentary from online business publications, such as Silicon.com.
The material from these publications, and the material they direct you to, will provide good starting points to building your personal index of Web sites, for daily or weekly visiting.
For further suggestions and other material, you might want to:
Call on your local library. This could be your company library, if you have one, that for your professional institute or, in large towns and cities, the public library. Most librarians are keen to help and can often put you in touch with people who can help you further. You may need to go to a library to get hold of some of the books I mention.
Go to the Web sites of the main online booksellers and see what is popular and what readers recommend (not always the same thing). Take readers' reviews with a pinch of salt; they are not always what they seem.
Consult Wikipedia. This is an online encyclopaedia compiled and updated by its readers, and is also free. Despite what you might at first think, the quality of articles is often high. The range is broad and the linking between entries is excellent.
Many sites offer emailed newsletters you can subscribe to. These give reasonably up-to-date information.
For the latest on-line news and comment, use an RSS aggregator. Not as fearsome as it sounds, this is software that collects material as soon as it appears on those Web sites you wish to keep an eye on. I use the GreatNews reader, which is currently free, in beta form at least. Some Web browsers or email software incorporate an RSS reader.
Make your own home page
You can easily turn your list of links into an HTML file. To it you can add the URLs for your favourite search engines, flight booking services, the corporate intranet and whatever else you need.
You don't need special expertise for this; most modern word processing packages offer the option of saving in HTML. Make the file your home page – the page you see first when you start your browser – and it can be your own portal to the Web.
Here's mine, below. As you see, a home page does not need to be complicated to be useful. (The reverse is often the case. Too many site designers put trickery above practicality.) The contents of mine reflect the interests of an industry watcher in Britain; yours would no doubt be quite different. 
Click on the image for an enlarged version and an explanation of some of the entries. 
My home page (small)