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An advice I often get is to join some technical society like ACM or IEEE and follow their journals to keep knowledge up to date. However, I don't know which one is the best. What group do you recommend? What journal do you think is good for software developers?

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I have been a member of both ACM and the IEEE Computer Society for quite a few years. I find the CACM and IEEE Software the most useful and informative when it comes to programming. IEEE also has a number of journals in more specialty fields depending on what field you work in. In both cases I highly recommend the Digital Library subscription in addition to the regular membership. It is more than worth it.

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+1: I'm also a member of both, and agree with all of this. – Don Roby Oct 19 '10 at 14:59
Beside access to journals, what else do membership offer? How do you take full advantage of membership? – user5697 Oct 20 '10 at 1:15
IEEE Computer Society: computer.org/portal/web/membership/benefit-home and ACM: acm.org/membership/benefits - I'd also suggest the ACM Queue as a more general read across CS & IT topics queue.acm.org – mctylr Dec 31 '10 at 18:14
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I'm a member of ACM, which I highly recommend. I find that digital library the most useful feature but I'm a student... The number of journals is huge so I just take the one i'm most interested in as well as CACM, which covers all the most important stuff in one magazine.

You also get a 3-times weekly email newsletter summarising developments in the field and an email forwarding account like: you@acm.org. Lots of other stuff that I have'nt used yet.

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The Digital Portal is huge. Professional subs are USD 99 per year, and access to the Digital Portal's an extra USD 99, for a total of USD 198. That's around USD 0.50 per day for access to something like 60 years' worth of journals! – Frank Shearar Oct 19 '10 at 12:17
Yep. And the student subscription is even cheaper – rmx Oct 19 '10 at 12:24
Most Universities have campus wide access to the digital library, so if you are a student, and can live with only accessing it on campus or through VPN, it might not cost you anything. – KeithB Oct 19 '10 at 16:07
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"To keep knowledge up to date" I use to visit this two sites and also recommend to others. They will keep you up to date about tech and science in "general".

You may consider being a member of ACM or IEEE for info regarding "Computer Science" and tech also. But they are more academic in nature and have less to do with "Software Development". But are really important for professors and research students. And another thing- probably you have to pay for the membership.

Again there are other sources of up to date informations for developers. And mainly, the sources are blogs of other veteran developers. But it depends mostly on the platform and tool you use. You have to search for community that suits your needs. And this stackoverflow page can help-

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5119/what-are-the-best-rss-feeds-for-programmers-developers

And again what I feel, stay with this stackoverflow.com and similar stackexchange.com sites. You will learn so many things. These may be old but worth learning.

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I don't like blogs and websites because they are often populist and usually don't have proper fact-checking. Academic journals usually have better fact-checking and feature more cutting-edge knowledge (up-to-date knowledge to the most extreme sense). – user5697 Oct 20 '10 at 17:16
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@user5697 You can go for your choice. But I found them useful. I was a member of ACM. And the news their daily newsletter seemed less interesting to me. And you said "software developers" in the question. I actually did not get anything for the "software developers". It was rather for "computer scientists". And if you go to the right blogs, like blogs of the member of some language/framework specification/development team, you will get the right info IMHO. I'm not saying look into every blog you can reach. – Gulshan Oct 21 '10 at 3:10
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Communications of ACM

It has a good combinations of research articles, good day-to-day practical implementations articles, and policies round tables from time to time.

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For software development, there is an organization based in the UK called ACCU. It used to stand for Association of C and C++ Users, but has morphed into something that covers all aspects of professional software development and various languages. It is focused on people who develop software or a living, so its more applied and less academic that ACM or IEEE journals. They also host a annual conference that attracts so big names in the software community. Last year included Robert Martin (Uncle Bob), Tom Gilb, Andrei Alexandrescu, Walter Bright, Kevlin Henney, Michael Stal , James Coplien, Diomidis Spinellis, and John Lakos.

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