35.3. Periodicals

Lowbrow Programmer Magazines

These magazines are often available at local newsstands:

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Software Development. http://www.sdmagazine.com. This magazine focuses on programming issues less on tips for specific environments than on the general issues you face as a professional programmer. The quality of the articles is quite good. It also includes product reviews.

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Dr. Dobb's Journal. http://www.ddj.com. This magazine is oriented toward hard-core programmers. Its articles tend to deal with detailed issues and include lots of code.

If you can't find these magazines at your local newsstand, many publishers will send you a complimentary issue, and many articles are available online.

Highbrow Programmer Journals

You don't usually buy these magazines at the newsstand. You usually have to go to a major university library or subscribe to them for yourself or your company:

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IEEE Software. http://www.computer.org/software/. This bimonthly magazine focuses on software construction, management, requirements, design and other leading-edge software topics. Its mission is to "build the community of leading software practitioners." In 1993, I wrote that it's "the most valuable magazine a programmer can subscribe to." Since I wrote that, I've been Editor in Chief of the magazine, and I still believe it's the best periodical available for a serious software practitioner.

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IEEE Computer. http://www.computer.org/computer/. This monthly magazine is the flagship publication of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Society. It publishes articles on a wide spectrum of computer topics and has scrupulous review standards to ensure the quality of the articles it publishes. Because of its breadth, you'll probably find fewer articles that interest you than you will in IEEE Software.

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Communications of the ACM. http://www.acm.org/cacm/. This magazine is one of the oldest and most respected computer publications available. It has the broad charter of publishing about the length and breadth of computerology, a subject that's much vaster than it was even a few years ago. As with IEEE Computer, because of its breadth, you'll probably find that many of the articles are outside your area of interest. The magazine tends to have an academic flavor, which has both a bad side and a good side. The bad side is that some of the authors write in an obfuscatory academic style. The good side is that it contains leading-edge information that won't filter down to the lowbrow magazines for years.

Special-Interest Publications

Several publications provide in-depth coverage of specialized topics.

Professional Publications

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The IEEE Computer Society publishes specialized journals on software engineering, security and privacy, computer graphics and animation, internet development, multimedia, intelligent systems, the history of computing, and other topics. See http://www.computer.org for more details.

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The ACM also publishes special-interest publications in artificial intelligence, computers and human interaction, databases, embedded systems, graphics, programming languages, mathematical software, networking, software engineering, and other topics. See http://www.acm.org for more information.

Popular-Market Publications

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These magazines all cover what their names suggest they cover.

The C/C++ Users Journal. http://www.cuj.com.

Java Developer's Journal. http://www.sys-con.com/java/.

Embedded Systems Programming. http://www.embedded.com.

Linux Journal. http://www.linuxjournal.com.

Unix Review. http://www.unixreview.com.

Windows Developer's Network. http://www.wd-mag.com.