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Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly)
Tim O'Reilly
looks at technology trends as indicated by book sales statistics.
"In terms of computer languages, PHP (up 16%) continues its strong growth. C# (up 2.5% over last year) was the only other programming language whose growth was in positive territory. By contrast, sales of books on Java (down 10%), Visual Basic (down 23%), C/C++ (down 4%), Perl (down 14%), Python (down 9%), and Javascript (down 12%) were all lower than they were in the same period a year ago."
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Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 15:09 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] Well, you know we have this Internet thing now. It allows us to find things out without buying a book. So, maybe looking at tech trends by book sales isn't very useful.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 15:32 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] There's also another metric they might want to look at: how many new books were published for each language. If 30,000 people are very happily using a language with a good book they bought three years ago, it doesn't show up on the 'books bought' radar.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 17:54 UTC (Wed) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link] So, C/C++ people are more internet-savvy than PHP people?
So, it's not exactly a balanced sample, but it is interesting none the less.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 22:25 UTC (Wed) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] So, C/C++ people are more internet-savvy than PHP people?Total book sales could very well be down due to "internet savvy", but PHP's growth in popularity could simply be overcoming the general downward trend.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 23:10 UTC (Wed) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link] The C++ is also a very OLD language(and my favourite...), whichmeans that there are probably many good books out there, many tutorials out there, it's tahught in schools, etc.
Even the old books do pretty well, because stuff like
Javascript/DHTML books will be back Posted Apr 27, 2005 15:35 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] Once O'Reilly trots out its "AJAX in a Nutshell" to capitalize on the labelling/rebranding of DHTML, and as evidenced in apps like Google Maps.
It is also likely that many people who want Java books already have them, and I am sure the used book market is flooded with Java books.
In general I am starting to sour on O'Reilly. They used to follow the commendable practice of only issuing one book per subject, and they packed everything they knew into that one book and it was a great book. Now popular topics like Java recieve coverage in numerous books and it is impossible to figure out which one is appropriate, useful, etc. There is also rampant repurposing of content in many of their books. How many times can DSN be introduced and explained? Almost every networking and sysadmin book they publish provides yet-another-DNS-intro, and this is just one example. This devalues their entire line because it is unclear over time what the definitive source is.
Javascript/DHTML books will be back Posted Apr 27, 2005 19:36 UTC (Wed) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] O'Reilly started to lose it years ago when they included MSQL with their MySQL book. As somebody who was heavily into both at one point it was pretty obvious that MSQL was going the way of the dodo and with good reason. The resulting book ended up being muddled and much less informative then it should have been.
In the interest of full disclosure I had sent them a preliminary proposal to write such a book and never got a response. Which was kind of annoying since at the time I was the primary author of much of the documentation that was available for MySQL.
Still, O'Reilly has published a number of outstanding books over the years and the Unix and Linux world have gained significant benifit from O'Reilly's efforts.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 16:15 UTC (Wed) by awksedgrep (guest, #7513) [Link] O'Reilly should be kicking themselves for their (stupid) policy of not publishing Lisp books. Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" has had some rather high sales rankings on Amazon since it was published a few weeks ago.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 16:33 UTC (Wed) by drosser (guest, #29597) [Link] That's odd, I didn't know O'Reilly had a thing against Lisp. They don't have a thing against Lispers though, as they had Paul Graham speak at Powell's during OSCon in Portland last year right after they published Hackers and Painters. Of course, I had him sign a copy of Common Lisp :-)
Too bad I can't read his handwriting...but I'm pretty sure it's Lisp...
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 18:34 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] Other publishing houses, such as APress, Addison-Wesley, and such,already have the market on Lisp books. O'Reilly can't really compete with that, so they target the newer technologies that are just maturing, or the ones that haven't been standardized yet. Lisp is an old subject, as is C, and you'll find a lot of other publishers in those areas.
Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator (O'Reilly) Posted Apr 27, 2005 21:31 UTC (Wed) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]
O'Reilly also has something against O'Caml. They've publisehed an O'Caml book, but only in France!
ocaml book is on the web in english Posted Apr 29, 2005 20:00 UTC (Fri) by j1m+5n0w (guest, #20285) [Link] It's been translated to english, and is available on the web:http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/index.html and has been reviewed on slashdot: http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/2129226... I don't think it's available in dead-tree form, though.
I've been learning ocaml recently, and it's been my main source of documentation. There have been a few times when I've had to look for information elsewhere because they left out some small but important detail, but otherwise it's pretty good, and has a lot of interesting real-world code examples.
Only a foolish person would diss their numbers Posted Apr 27, 2005 18:35 UTC (Wed) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link] Use what they've shown you as an indicator of future trends and quit whining because you disagree with them or your favorite all but forgotten language is not in the forefront of their concerns.
Look at the numbers, that's where your competition is, and that is where the future is, and please stop whining.
pet hate Posted Apr 28, 2005 0:12 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] There's no such language as "C/C++". Stop it, or I'll whine!
pet hate Posted Apr 28, 2005 14:39 UTC (Thu) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link] I agree. I know C well but I'm having to (re-)learn C++ for my Master's thesis and it's a very different animal. Granted it's backwards compatible so you can write C++ that looks just like C but if you really want to learn to use the features of C++, there's a pretty good learning curve.
pet hate Posted Apr 28, 2005 16:39 UTC (Thu) by jeffg (guest, #20473) [Link] there isn't? gee... i've been programming in C and C++ and linking 'em together for years [big-WINK]. tsktsk... write FORTRAN to be called by perl and then you've got some cause for splitting hairs
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