Culture of Theoretical Computer Science
                  (highly subjective and incomplete)


Professional Organizations

  IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
    -- general CS and EE, not just theory
  ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
    -- general CS, not just theory, but it sponsors ...
    SIGACT (Special Interest Group for Algorithms and Computation Theory)
  SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)
    -- general applied math, including theoretical CS
  EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science)

Major Conferences

  primarily USA
    FOCS (IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science)
      -- annual, during the fall
    STOC (ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing)
      -- annual, during the spring
    LICS (Logic in Computer Science)
      -- annual
    SODA (ACM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms)
      -- annual, usually winter?
    CCC (IEEE/SIGACT Conference on Computational Complexity)
      -- annual, usually early summer
    CRYPTO ( ... Cryptography ...)
      -- annual, late summer
    COLT (Conference on Learning Theory)
      -- annual, winter?
    POPL (Principles of Programming Languages)
      -- annual, winter?
  Europe
    ICALP (EATCS International Conference on Automata, Languages,
        and Programming)
      -- annual, early summer
    STACS (joint GI/AFCET Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer
        Science)
      -- annual, winter, alternates between France and Germany
  Asia
    COCOON (Computing and Combinatorics Conference)
      -- annual, late summer, East Asia
    FSTTCS (Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and
        Theoretical Computer Science)
      -- annual, late fall early winter, India
    ISAAC (International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation)
      -- annual, late fall early winter, East Asia

Major Journals

  Journal of the ACM
  Journal of Symbolic Logic (only sometimes in scope)
  SIAM Journal on Computing
  Journal of Computer and System Sciences
  Information and Computation (formerly Information and Control)
  Theoretical Computer Science
  Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory)
  Information Processing Letters

Notes

  FOCS and STOC are the two premier conferences in general TCS.  They
  are more or less interchangeable.
  JACM and JSL are highly prestigious, premium journals.  The next
  four are top-tier and more or less equivalent.  The last two are
  second-tier.

Internet Resources

  TheoryNet is an email list that disseminates generally useful
  information to TCS practitioners, including conference
  calls-for-papers, special journal issues and new journals, job
  postings, etc.  I recommend joining this list if you're serious.  Go
  to http://listserv.nodak.edu/archives/theorynt.html to sign up.

  USC has a subscription to the ACM Digital Library, from which almost
      all its journals and proceedings are available.
  There are some electronic archives containing unrefereed TCS papers
      that are "hot off the press":
    ECCC (Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity)
        http://eccc.uni-trier.de/eccc/
    E-print Archive (Includes subjects other than CS)
        http://arxiv.org/
          -- I hang out at cs.CC and quant-ph

  Some blogs (an extremely biased sample; all these guys have links to
      each other; suggestions are welcome)
    http://weblog.fortnow.com -- by Lance Fortnow, an established
      complexity theorist at the University of Chicago (favorite
      theorems, conference news, academic politics, career advice,
      etc.)
    http://geomblog.blogspot.com/ -- by Suresh Venkatasubramanian at
      AT&T labs (TCS with emphasis on computational geometry)
    http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/ -- by Jeff Erickson (theory,
      computational geometry)
    http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ -- by Scott Aaronson, a post-doc
      at Waterloo (quantum computing, complexity theory, existential
      and cosm(ic|ological) ruminations)
    http://dabacon.org/pontiff/ -- by Dave Bacon (quantum information
      and computing)
    http://www.qinfo.org/people/nielsen/blog/ -- by Michael Nielsen
      (quantum physics, including quantum information)

  The Complexity Zoo (http://qwiki.caltech.edu/wiki/Complexity_Zoo) is a
  reasonably successful attempt at cataloguing all complexity classes
  ever studied.