Allegedly, Dr. Dobb's Journal is dead. Frankly, Dr. Dobb's Journal been dead to me for a long time. The issues I've read have focused so heavily on things I just don't give a damn about that I never read it. However, maybe there's another reason it died. Read the big, bold cover story title on the cover:
Functional Programming: Has It's Ship Come In?
Notice anything interesting about that? The major title, on the cover, has a huge damned typo. "Its", not "it's". Maybe, just maybe, they had editorial quality issues? I make tyops (sic) all the time. This is a blog. Big deal. I don't stress about it too much. I am a bit embarrassed about the obvious typo in my perl.com article on lexing, but not enough that I ever sent them an email begging them to fix my mistake (you'll need good eyes to spot it and I don't blame them for missing it). But a print magazine? The cover of the print magazine? Wow. Just wow.
Irrelevant content (to me) and a huge typo on their cover. Now give me my dynamic languages journal and I'll be happy.
I just hope the people teaching Computer Science degrees have realised that tradtional CompSci stuff (like optimising algorithms) is now largely irrelevant for what most of their graduates are going to be doing, and are teaching development practices like TDD, Continuous Integration, Agile, etc.
But I doubt they have.
Re:I think the irrelevant content is more of an is
Ovid on 2009-01-09T11:47:32
While I'm not entirely certain I agree that the CompSci stuff is largely irrelevant, I will agree that universities do seem to be doing a bad job of teaching graduates skills they'll actually need. I don't care if you can code a heap sort from memory as that probably won't influence my decision to hire you. If you are a TDD fan, however, it will influence my decision to hire you (not that I do hiring at the BBC, but I have in the past).
