How does the data relate to the number and availability of new titles for a given language? For example, I would expect Ruby to be on the rise in book sales as it is a new language. This is an interesting signal of technology trend. I bet Ada book sales have been higher than usual recently (e.g. Lastly, on your measure a language that has frequent major changes or extensions will bulk larger than one that stays pretty much the same. And maybe declining Java book sales imply, to some extent, that there are a lot of Java developers out there who already know the language pretty well. So, while there will be some correlation, I wonder if the high C# book sales might simply reflect the fact that a lot of developers are trying to learn it, in the expectation that it will be useful sometime in the future. I would prefer them to know the language pretty well already. Suppose people are buying lots of books on C# does that really correlate with high usage of C#? Personally, if I had some people writing an application for me, I would be happier if their first move was NOT to rush out and buy books about it. Strikes me that the methodology - although it's the only one easily open to you - is suspect. Few publishers expected the quick uptake of Java AJAX and Ruby on Rails. On the one hand, you could interpret this as meaning that open source is slower to market, but I think it says the opposite: open source projects can move fast, and catch publishers by surprise. You can see how Ruby's sharp ascent follows the introduction of Rails, and that PHP's fortunes reversed before book sales showed that web developers in search of rapid development languages moved over to RoR (and Microsoft's ASP.Net suite of technologies.)Īlso worth noting on this chart is that book sales tend to spike even before the release of commercial languages, as the vendors work with publishers to get books out by the release date, while books on open source projects tend to trail the release date. Also worthy of note in these graphs is the long, slow decline of Java and C/C++, and the continuing rise in market share of C#. I wrote yesterday about the rise of Ruby and Javascript, driven by the move towards Web 2.0 applications. Here's the 3-year programming language market share trend based on computer book sales: In his presentation at OSCON, Roger Magoulas, the director of O'Reilly Research, provided some interesting graphs based on our trends data mart.
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