The end of an era
A few months ago, the 30-year-old C/C++ Users Journal printed its last issue, and notified me that my remaining balance would be transferred to Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ). At the time, I assumed that this was due perhaps to not enough programmers wanting to read only about C++. And after all, other publications have always done a better job covering rather important programming topics, and with a better sense of perspective than the language-myopic CUJ could ever achieve. However, a recent turn of events has made me wonder if something else is going on.
DDJ, now flush with all of those ex-C/C++ Users Journal readers, has suddenly morphed into a tabloidal, noisy, content-free assembly of thinly veiled advertisements. Their new “column” was written by the president of Perforce software, and of course it was all about how to use his company’s products in new ways so that you can bring him new customers. All of the technical articles are gone, and the new, hyper-glossy pages gleam with brightly colored pictures of silver-bullet products and the faces of those who are hawking them.
There is much more to observe about this ugly shift, but it’s all bad news, and that’s about enough said.
Fortunately ACM has been going the other direction just as dramatically, and they have recently started to provide remarkably pertinent information and publications. I have here the April 2006 issue, in hardcopy, of the “Operating Systems Review” (published by the SIGOPS group), as well as the latest volume of “Computer Architecture News” (published by the SIGARCH group). And rather than the usual pile of unreadable, marginally-fraudulent doctoral papers (what else can you call it, when people crank out unreadable, probably wrong and certainly irrelevant dead-end “research” papers? See the SIGCOMM archives for as many examples as you care to read), these appear to have actually been read, understood, and edited.
ACM’s email newsletters are also a remarkable achievement: someone has actually taken the time to sift through various news reports and write up one-paragraph summaries, with hyperlinks to the original articles. This is an astute move, and one that shows a very up-to-the-minute understanding of what software practitioners need, in terms of news and cross-disciplinary information.
As for IEEE, they’re muddling along somewhere at the low end lately: they seem to understand which topics are hot, but they can’t seem to muster the writing and editorial talent to actually make many of the articles themselves worth reading. Let’s hope this improves. When Bob Colwell wrote his last column, a few months ago, there was suddenly not much to read.
So, considering that a big part of this site’s mission is to provide recommendations to the working software designers out there, here you go:
- (”Sell”) Drop DDJ like a hot rock. It is not even suitable for toilet paper these days.
- (”Buy”) Sign up for ACM, and be sure to subscribe to their email newsletters.
- (”Hold”) IEEE is hard to recommend right now, but it could improve.