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.