I joined the ACM. Which resources should I look at first?

Question

I joined the ACM last year. The Communications magazine is a huge plus, but they have so many other things available, I feel like I'm very much missing something I should be reading. The number of journals alone I can pick from is overwhelming. (And hard to parse through if you don't already know what you're looking for!)

Suggestions? I'm not academic, don't have anyone to help me out there, and don't really know what I should be looking for in the list.

If it matters, my primary work focus is object-oriented web development, with a strong interest in better user interface design/functionality/usability, and a second focus in project management.

Answer 1

First, if you are a student or faculty, you get access to a subset of Microsoft programs through a special agreement, so register for that.

The best resource in the ACM is by far the digital library - It gives you access to a variety of conference papers and journal articles.

My experience is that many of the papers in software engineering, while academic, are actually quite approachable and useful to non-academics.

A journal is a more expanded and finalized version of a conference paper. However, it is also more exclusive so many important papers never make it to journals. In addition, several years usually pass between conference and publication. A conference paper is usually shorter, but in good conferences conveys good ideas in approachable forms.

Good journals for a practitioner to look at include TSE (Transactions on Software Engineering) and TOSEM (Don't even remember the acronyms).

For software engineering, the best conferences are arguably ICSE, FSE, and ASE. In addition, OOPSLA and ECOOP are the top conferences for OOP, but many great OOP papers are in general SE conferences. If you are interested more in development environments and tools, CHI, CSCW, and VLHCC are also great conferences to look at.

You would probably want to browse by conference. The Digital Library's search engine is IMHO incredibly broken, so you are actually better off using Google for specific topics.