> Computer Science, as a field is very mature,

CS is less than 100 years old. How do you see it as "mature"?

Mature in that there are many sub-disciplines and an extremely large academic community that studies and researches very specific aspects.

CS could better be described as moribund rather than mature. The reason why nobody has taken the time to create a digest of academic computer science papers (other than the ACM) is because 90% of such papers are not worth reading.

"find the appropriate journals. Get an ACM membership so you can search and get full text of the library"

for developers with full time jobs?

How else are you gonna pay for the ACM membership? ;-)

Really, it's a matter of making time for reading and learning. Pick up a paper sometime at night when you don't feel like coding and would otherwise watch TV. Or print it out and read it on the subway or carpool.

You also mentioned Cormen being too hard for the "average developer" and covering stuff you didn't learn in college. Cormen is intended as a textbook for later undergrads or early grad student courses. If you didn't learn the material in college, Cormen is your chance to learn it. And you have to treat it just like you're in college again - really, you can't expect to just magically know things. The whole point is to learn from it - if it covered stuff you already knew, there'd be no reason to read it.

clarification: Cormen is wonderfully easy to read, relatively speaking. I learnt from Automata Theory, Formal Languages, and Computation, by Aho, Hopcroft, Ullman. That was hard :)

They made ACM with digital library close to $200... ugh.