The end of an era - Dr Dobb's last issue
I just received the last issue of Dr Dobbs Journal. Effective in January 2009, Dr Dobbs will stop as an independent magazine. Instead, a Dr Dobbs report will be added to the Information Week magazine. This is the last of the great IT magazines to close. Magazines like the Journal of Object Oriented Programming, the C/C++ Users Journal, the Windows Developer Magazine and Software Development magazine. One by one those great magazines either closed or merged - into Dr Dobbs itself. It was a sad process to see those magazines diminish - literally get thinner and include more and more ads as they tried to reduce costs and improve revenues. Unfortunatelly, the reduction in content drove readers away and one by one the magazines closed. At merely 48 pages, the last issue of Dr Dobbs is painfully thin compared to the 100 pages of previous years.
I trully believe that I've learned more from those magazines than any book or course I ever took. They both taught and broadened my horizons. It is really sad that people prefer blogs and sites instead of magazines. The quality of the articles of the magazines was vastly superior to the quality of most blogs. With columnists like Scott Ambler, Martin Fowler, Herb Sutter, Grady Booch and many others, in-depth articles on subjects raining from driver developoment to patterns and from CMM to agile development, those magazines provided both breadth and depth of coverage. Their Book Review columns were invaluable for separating good from bad books and selecting the best - a far cry from other magazines' "summary of the publisher's summary" reviews. I first read about patterns in those magazines, I heard about the GoF book and several others by Fowler, Martin, Booch and Jacobson on their reviews. Those magazines showed me what the state of the art in IT was.
At least, the last of the great magazines can't close. IEEE Software is published by the IEEE Computer Society so it will stay in print as long as the Computer Society exists (I hope).