It appears that Dr. Dobbs Journal is dead. Beginning in January 2009, Dr. Dobb’s Journal will become “Dr. Dobbs Report — A Special Software Development Monthly Section in InformationWeek magazine.”
According to a posting on the InformationWeek website:
“Led by Dr. Dobb’s Editor-in-Chief Jon Erickson, Dr. Dobb’s Report focuses on the tools, technologies, people, products and services transforming the software development marketplace. Anchored by new in-depth Analytic Reports the Dobbs editorial team will produce in 2009, Dr. Dobb’s Report highlights the most business-critical perspective and strategies to help the readers of InformationWeek Magazine define and frame software development objectives.”
As discussed in ZTrek, Dr. Dobb’s parent company TechWeb has often used InformationWeek as a dumping ground for its dead magazines. For example, in 2007 the company shut down its Network Computing and Optimize publications, and folded some of their content and branding into InformationWeek.
I was a huge Dr. Dobbs fan a decade ago when the magazine was focused on C++ Windows development. But as I migrated to .NET, the single .NET section in the magazine was not enough for me to justify its expense.
The problem with Dr. Dobbs is it tried to be all things to all programmers. But as technology continues to get grow more complex, programmers often find they must specialize to be truly effective and advance in their careers. So naturally .NET programmers will gravitate toward .NET magazines and websites, etc. And so a generalist magazine like Dr. Dobbs will have little use in our daily work lives.
As Eric.Weblog stated, perhaps the saddest thing about Dr. Dobbs passing is going out with a huge grammatical error on the front cover of its final issue (see above). Yes, Dr. Dobbs, its (sic) time for you to go.
Article published on January 9, 2009
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January 10th, 2009 at 7:57 am
DDJ became some sort of my bible during my college days (around 13yrs ago), so this story is quite sad. But Jon Erickson see it quite differently, DDJ is just “changing.”
January 10th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[…] I saw that it’s changing from a “journal” to a “report” and being included […]
February 24th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Anyone notice that all the blogs about Dr. Dobb’s departure are citing the Z Trek blog, which is written by the co-founder of Dr. Dobb’s greatest competitor SD Times.
Suddenly the blogosphere is full of headlines like “RIP Dr. Dobb’s”, but InfoWorld halted their print a long time ago and are just fine.
I have yet to find any evidence that Dr. Dobb’s is “dead” by any means whatsoever. They are just continuing to reduce the focus on print, like everybody else.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
How about someone at Dr. Dobbs gets around to fixing their Unsubscribe?
If you got onto the “Dr. Dobb’s” email list, you can NOT unsubscribe.
Probably related, if you email anyone@cmp.com, your email gets rejected for an SPF error. Apparently CMP relays inbound email from one external server to a second, internal server… and the internal server does an SPF check!! Basically any domain using valid SPF records will be rejected by CMP’s mail server. Lovely.
So probably that’s what is causing Unsubscribe requests to be lost. Or at the least, it’s why you can’t email a real person at the CMP websites to beg them to take you off their list (I don’t really need ads for Sybase, etc. thank you very much).