long story short, im looking for any recommendations for good magazines. Print would be preferable to enjoy over my morning coffee and to take a “screen break” (as I would say to my kids) but also to leave on the coffee table to hopefully inspire my kids who are becoming interested in electronics. In these pandemic times when it is hard to get to trade shows and conferences I’m looking to keep up with the industry news, new parts and techniques etc.
I’m currently working with cellular, IoT and embedded devices and this would be my primary interest along with embedded linux. Secondary is really anything in the electronics design world.
I currently have subscriptions to Make and am considering something like MagPi for some lighter reading. Elektor, Circuit Cellar and epe mag have also come up on my radar.
Circuit Cellar is quite good. I also recommend some of the IEEE magazines, depending on what your interests are, e.g. Spectrum or Computer magazine. My issue with magazines is that I stockpile many of them and it takes ages for me to catch up.
Long time no post on this one! So i ended up subscribing to Circuit Cellar and Elektor (along with my current Make subscription) - which looks to cover my needs for now. IEEE i didn’t find so helpful/useful to be honest. Elektor looks to cater more to hobby/maker (though more EE dedicated than Make Magazine) where as Circuit Cellar looks to be more industrial.
Circuit Cellar was a tough sell, I prefer paper + digital (read the paper copy, note the articles to save and then you’ve always got them in digital format and can recycle the paper copy). Elektor has a good deal, and so does Make in getting digital + print. On the other hand, Circuit Cellar is $50 for digital, $75 for print and $110 for both! Ouch! I don’t get why, it doesn’t cost any extra to include digital with a print subscription… i’d be happy to pay a couple extra bucks, but 50% extra is a bit much IMO
Some tips:
Discount codes for Elektor worked for me
Green (digital) = 2ElekFun21D
Gold (print) = 2ElekFun21
You can get a $20 discount on Circuit Cellar if you buy a back-issue first! I discovered this the hard way, the first issue of my subscription had a “part 2” of an article and I wanted to read Part 1, bought the back issue for $9 and was offered $20 off the subscription i already paid!
Glad CC has been useful! I write for them occasionally so don’t have any real connection, but I’ve noticed that they’ve started posting articles on their website more recently a couple months after the print edition happens. So things change over time - to be honest I’d drop them a note about your pricing feedback.
I think a lot of these things are different experiments etc on pricing. On the other hand you end up with lots of magazine companies that are like “$90 for digital, $110 for printed, or $115 for both”. Of course they have zero intention of selling you anything besides the highest priced one, so they go out of their way to make it seem like you’d be an idiot to get anything besides that.
Thanks for sharing the deals for CC and Elektor!
I’m curious which IEEE magazines you looked into. My personal favorite is the Circuits and Systems Magazine. Here’s a recent one:
Hey @coflynn cool! I messaged them actually, and got a cryptic answer - "It is the international shipping cost that makes the price jump. " - which is odd; im happy to pay the international shipping price for print, but how does that make the print + digital so much more expensive?!
Funny story. Here in South Korea, one of the local English language newspapers has a partnership with the New York Times. The normal subscription includes print and digital for both papers. I don’t really need print, so I’ve checked several times over the years about a digital-only subscription. It always comes out more expensive. Weird. But fortunately, this newspaper has no problem if you want your paper delivered to a friend. So I have the print editions sent to a friend in Seoul, and I only read the digital version.
professional membership (since im only a student still here on CE… does that count? @ChrisGammell can we register contextualelectronics.edu as a domain and get mail addresses?! (just a joke, of course!)) is $85.50 per year
so, yearly access to Circuits and Systems is 85.50 + 24 = $109.5
I think you are looking at the wrong journal. Circuits & Systems Magazine is free for members of the Circuits & Systems Society, which costs $14.50 in addition to standard membership. This interesting material is in the Transactions on Circuits and Systems (I & II) which would be $12 on top of that.
The general rule is that societies are relatively cheap to join, and necessary to get access to the specialised material at low cost. The non-society member price for a publication is usually the same as society+publication, so just join the society…
I personally think the IEEE transactions are all a bargain in any fields of interest, but in the ‘old days’ of only printed journals they soon filled a huge space. The online access (Explore) is great as you can search and access all past editions of the journals.
That’s interesting, I didn’t realise you could join societies without first joining the IEEE!
You would need to also subscribe to the transactions too, otherwise you will just get the magazine, which isn’t so interesting. I had also got the pricing wrong - $24 in addition to membership.
If there is a university near you, you might be able to get access (all academic libraries here are open to everyone). The library WiFi will have an IP address that will be tied to the university IEEE subscription, and with that you will have access to all the societies and conference publications. I would recommend having a browse if possible, before committing to a subscription that you may not find suits you.
@Yuji above provided a link to an example, it looked very interesting… i should probably be a member of the IEEE anyway! but this shows the confusing nature of the IEEE memberships (at least to me)
I have looked into this before! You need to be an accredited university, which we will never be. I had looked at this to get the Analog Discovery 2 at educational pricing levels, but instead went to Digilent and we came up with the current method to get the devices under special pricing.
(just a joke, of course!)) is $85.50 per year
