Dominus wrote:

...Communications of the ACM, which is perfectly awful.

Interesting... That's one of my principal reasons for wanting to join the ACM. Sometimes it seems that at work, there's not as much motivation to to read/learn/explore as at college, for example. I was thinking that CACM would provide good brain food (and grinder seems to like it too, though not as much as DDJ). Apparently you disagree. Why?

Says t'mo:

Apparently you disagree. Why?

It's hard for me to come up with too many concrete examples, because I threw all my issues of the magazine away, and because towards the end I threw it away without reading it. My recollection is that there were a lot of articles that were heavy on buzzwords and short on technical information. One issue I got was entirely devoted to ERP. But there was no explanation of what ERP was. (It turns out that it stands for "Enterprise Resource Planning" and has something to do with inventory control.)

One day I said to myself "OK, I'm going to sit down and force myself to read one of these articles all the way through, to find out what it's about. But it wasn't about anything; it was just blather. Afterwads it reminded me of that episode in Richard Feynman's memoirs where he's reading some paragraph-long sentence like "The individual member of the social community often receives information via visual, symbolic channels" and he eventually figures out that it means "People read."

The ERP stuff was unusually heinous, but not out of character with the rest of the magazine. Each month it would arrive and clutter my doorstep with a lot of blah-blah.

One particularly crapulent article that stands out in my memory was an article about "distance education" which is when people take college courses via video and submit their assignments via email. This is something I am interested in, and I looked forward to the article because it was advertised as having the results of the authors' research into the efficacy of distance education. But when I acutally read the article, it turned out that this so-called 'research paper' contained no actual research whatsoever---they had gone to few undergraduates and asked them whether they thought it had been effective.

Even when the articles were on topics I found interesting, there usually wasn't much of substance to be found.

I asked in comp.org.acm whether there was something I was missing, and a surprising number of people agreed with me. For example:

It's no Dr. Dobb's Journal, that's for sure. CACM's current editorial policy seems to me unfocussed, insufficiently technical, and too accepting of inconsequential vague generalizations.

In my opinion you'd probably be much better off investing in a subscription to Economist magazine.

Hope this helps.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

There are a few other goodies. See http://www.acm.org/membership/benefits. I like SafariŽ Books Online, and sometimes the Skillsoft courses. Pretty decent education for $99/year.