Programming Magazines – on Paper!

Perhaps strangely for a developer, I much prefer reading from actual, physical books & magazines than a computer screen.  This is a bit problematic these days, as what with the rise of the Internet, nobody seems to be printing programming magazines any more (in the UK at least).

As such, I was most pleased to hear about MagCloud, an online service which offers printed magazines in a FUBU (For Us By Us) style.  Basically, anyone can upload a magazine in PDF format, and for a charge of around $0.20 a page, MagCloud will print it out and send it to you.  This works out at around £5-6 for a magazine of 40 pages, which is a little expensive but not too bad.  (There’s a delivery charge of $2-3 too, so you’re better off getting a couple at a time).  While the authors can make money from this (by adding on an extra charge per page), none of the ones I was looking at did so.

The two I checked out are well written and informative:

Hacker Monthly

Hacker Monthly, a general programming magazine, and

Rails Magazine

Rails Magazine, about Ruby/Rails.  I couldn’t find any specific .Net ones when I looked, but it’s pretty new so I’m sure one will appear at some point.  So if anyone fancies starting a .Net mag, here’s your chance!

Now, many of these are available as PDFs for you to download as well, so you could quite easily print them off yourself and save a few quid.  Personally, I’m too lazy/disorganised for that, and I like to have a proper magazine and not a scruffy collection of stapled sheets, but that’s just me.

Check it out.  What have you got to lose?!

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