Dr. Dobb's Journal, or
DDJ, as it is commonly abbreviated, is a well respected computer magazine that covers the more technical side of
software engineering.
It got it's start in 1976 as a newsletter published by Jim Warren, Jr. The original name was Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte, reflecting the informal attitude of computer hobbyists of the time, as well as overwhelming challenge of doing anything useful in the tiny amounts of RAM on early computers.
DDJ initially focused on Tiny BASIC, a popular and free BASIC interpreter for early microcomputers including the MITS Altair. From there, the magazine eventually broadened its scope to programming in general, and has evolved into one of the most popular technical journals for computer programming. Some notable contributers and articles over the years are:
- "Floating Point Routines for the 6502," by Steve Wozniak (August 1976)
- "Mathematical Typography," by Donald Knuth (March 1980)
- "Realizable Fantasies," by Richard Stallman (March 1985)
- "Writing Correct Software With Eiffel," by Bertrand Meyer (December 1989)
- "Porting UNIX to the 386," by William and Lynne Jolitz (January 1991)
- "One-Way Hash Functions," by Bruce Schneier (September 1991)
- "Examining the Windows AARD Detection Code," by Andrew Schulman (September 1993)
- "Randomness and the Netscape Browser," Ian Goldberg and David Wagner (January 1996)
- "Inside Softram 95," by Mark Russinovich, Bryce Cogswell, and Andrew Schulman (August 1996)
- "Inside the Pentium II Math Bug," by Robert R. Collins (August 1997)
- "The C# Programming Language," by Scott Wiltamuth (October 2000)
- "Mono and the .NET Framework," by Miguel de Icaza and Brian Jepson (January 2002)
DDJ is owned by CMP Media, and is published monthly. It is also published online at http://www.ddj.com.