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Read recent phd theses. They always have a few chapters at the front giving an overview of the state of the art of their subject area, to prove that the candidate knows it. As for subject area, just sample widely - it's impossible to know what will be useful in advance, and in any case it's all exercise for the brain.

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This is excellent advice. If you have a hard time following a thesis, look for introductory stuff in the bibliography.

CiteSeer (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/) is an excellent place to find theses, research papers, etc., and it has local PDF / PS caches for many of them. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) also works, though many results will be behind academic paywalls (e.g. the ACM) - the "all X versions" link will often have alternative links, such as faculty pages, including PDFs / PSs.

Re paywalls: that's why I use also http://academic.research.microsoft.com/. For some papers it has a PDF link on the bottom of the page. As a personal preference, I like it more than Scholar (scholar is more full-text search driven, while academic is more filtered).

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