Although many younger developers don’t remember—or maybe weren’t even born—it wasn’t that many years ago that the Web as we know it today didn’t exist and access to what did exist was hard to obtain. In those sad times it was difficult for the struggling n00b to find examples of code to study and learn from. Linux and even the wide availability of BSD derived systems were still in the future.
What we did have, though, was Dr. Dobbs. It was a magazine for programmers that every month offered high quality articles that taught its readers valuable lessons about programming. I certainly learned a load from it. It was generally considered the premier magazine of its type.
Like most other tech magazines, Dr. Dobbs fell on hard times when the Internet became widely available and offered untold riches of high quality code for study. Still, it motored on as a Webzine for several more years. Now, sadly, after 38 years, its owner is sunetting Dr. Dobbs. Advertisers have discovered that ads on such sites aren’t as productive as they are elsewhere so revenues are down sharply.
Those of us who learned so much from the magazine will mourn its passing but, really, its time had come. Nevertheless, I’ll miss it and the comfort of knowing it was there to visit whenever I felt the urge or saw a reference to one of its current articles that seemed particularly interesting. Rest in peace, Doctor.