ACM Anyone?

grantm on 2005-01-29T08:01:38

The Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) regularly send me paper spam trying to encourage me to join (I suspect they got my mailing details from Linux Journal). I always just bin it, but I've finally gotten round to emailing acmhelp@acm.org asking them to stop.

Is anyone here actually a member? If so, what benefit do you consider justifies the $84 annual membership fee?

---

ACM

n1vux on 2005-01-29T18:57:32

I was a member way back when, when the "Communications" was a reputable, useful semi-scholarly journal of record. I don't know if it's gotten back to being useful or not. I quit when my inbox of unread magazines got too deep some time in the late 80's or early 90's. I've maintained loose contact with the local Greater Boston chapter, with whose local Professional Development Seminar committee I was once very active, and remains one of the best bargains.

Their new member benefits have caused me to consider re-joining after a very long lapse.

• permanent professional email address
• online professional development courses & certifications "free" with membership (inclusive)
• free books online for members

If I decide to do so, I guess I should post a follow-up here

Re: ACM

grantm on 2005-01-29T21:12:01

I had a quick scan of the 'free' books but most are pretty old and the Open Source technologies I work with were not well represented. O'Reilly's Safari, while significantly more expensive, has a lot more titles that I'd actually use (not that I subscribe to that either).

Re:ACM

jmm on 2005-01-31T14:11:15

I also was a member long ago - through the 70's and into the 80's. Communications, in those days, had a series of articles by Jon Bentley which have since been published as 2 books "Programming Pearls" and "More Programming Pearls", which were excellent.

I stopped when my collection of not yet read magazines (I joined a large number of SIGs too) could be piled up to the ceiling.