Considering grad school? Read these.

Some books I have found useful:

• American Historical Association, Becoming a Historian: A Survival Manual for Women and Men, 1991 ed. by Melanie Gustafson.
• John A. Goldsmith, et al., The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure, Chicago, 2001.
• Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick, The Academic Job Search Handbook, Philadelphia, 1992.
• Robert L. Peters, Getting What You Came for: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D., 1997 rev. ed.
• Cynthia Verba, Scholarly Pursuits: A Guide to Professional Development during the Graduate Years, available directly from Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
  

If you're only going to read one of these, make it the Peters book, which is pragmatic in the extreme. If you can read two, read Peters and Verba. But the most useful thing I've found is this free e-book from Prof. Phil Agre of UCLA:

Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for Ph.D. Students

It's sad but true that graduate students--a slice of the population loaded with really smart people--are often very dumb when it comes to the nuts and bolts of putting together a successful career. Yes, it's scholarship, so in one sense it ought to be about ideas and hard work and new discoveries. But it's also an industry, so common-sense careerism will always have a place--a legitimate place. Grad students, no matter how brilliant, ignore this advice at their peril.