I can confirm that it’s totally worth it. It takes only a minute to purchase the download. I used my Paypal account and made the purchase as a Guest as I didn’t want to create yet another account on the Internet. Within seconds, I received a download link in my email.
After unzipping the download, there’s a shell script which starts a web server and opens your web browser at the Archive index. You can then either navigate by selecting an issue by year and month – or by using the search feature provided by the Archive web server. I’ve tried a number of search terms (“docker”, “ansible”, “mutt”) and can confirm that it works well; the only issue I’ve had is that the search results list the articles by the name of the column, e.g., this article [1] is listed as Hack and / rather than the more descriptive sub-title Take Mutt for a Walk.
I’d also confirm that the articles are not in plain text – they use HTML and include images (where appropriate). Best of all, there’s no visual clutter, e.g., distracting advertisements. The format reminds me a lot of the CDs with collections of digitised books that O’Reilly used to publish.
In my opinion, the archive is excellent value for money – and I’d highly recommend it.
$ shasum -a 256 LJArchive2017.zip fbf20d2a1708bb6ea37265c601b543266dd6a4f4f37221597f1e6683d07f7fe8 LJArchive2017.zip
A list of the contents is available https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e77e8558835bc0a6ff30a81c6a...
Luckily the Internet Archive has nice collection, but it isn't the same as the content of the DVD.
If you are in Seattle, the living computer museum has a small nook sized library with some really old issues.
- http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...
- https://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22ddj_dvd6%22
and
- https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02278....
I'm unsure if this is what you're referring to though.
What does / did the Doctor Dobbs Developer DVD contain? I used to read DDJ back in the day, when it was available (didn't have access to it in India, used to buy used copies at second-hand book shops, or sometimes read full articles standing right there in the shop, ha ha. Thankfully the shop owners never prevented me from doing that, maybe because of seeing my genuine interest, and I did buy copies once in a while). And I remember DDJ issues used to have ads about things like DDJ's CD-ROM of Alternative Programming Languages, and other such interesting stuff. Perusing the contents of such ads might even have been (not sure) how I got to know about Python, for example, which I use to this day :) A pity they had to shut down. I remember that the quality of the articles was very good, as was that of CUJ (C User's Journal). I also used to grab and read issues of these two magazines (and a few others, like VBPJ, Java Report and others) in the libraries of bigger companies where I worked some time later (the small one where I worked earlier didn't have much of a library, though it was not zero there either).
It's being sold for $11.99.
Here's the purchase link: http://lj.mybigcommerce.com/linux-journal-archive-1994-2017/
Apparently it's HTML-format. No mention is made of whether it includes images or how big the download is. My suspicion is that it's pure-text, which is really sad.
If anyone wants to look into scraping the site, I wouldn't mind jumping on board. (Suffice to say that... not everything submitted into the Web Archive is let back out.)