

Java retakes the top O'Reilly book rank in 2010 - carson
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/2010-book-market-4.html

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mark_l_watson
I have been programming since the early 1960s (as a kid, I got access to
timesharing basic on the arpanet) and am generally a diehard techie. Just my
opinion but the JVM platform is probably the "big event" software-wise
(comparing it to object oriented programming, relational databases, Lisp
Machines, etc.) in my lifetime.

Since Java is still the main language for the JVM, I am not surprised that
Java books are still popular even though the language is getting long in the
tooth.

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6ren
hmm, the VM concept dates back to 1966
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine>), though of course the JVM was
the first to achieve wide adoption. I hear there've been many advancements in
VM technology in the JVM, esp for JIT compilation, and (I don't know but)
possibly these could be fundamental.

I keep thinking of Alan Kay's claim that nothing significant has been invented
in computer science in the last 30 years (since 1980):
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

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tomjen3
I guess there are a number of people out there who are now studying Java so
they can write code for Android?

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evilmushroom
A number of us use Java for web development as well. (GWT for example) Not to
mention projects like Hadoop etc

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tomjen3
Wouldn't scalable be much more suitable for hadoop?

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olalonde
R is up 60%, SPSS up 9% [1]. I guess now would be a good time to get into the
data business...

[1] <http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2011/02/prog_lang_tree.jpg>

~~~
podperson
God I hope R eats SPSS for lunch.

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spenrose
If you look at
[http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2011/02/AllYearsLanguages.jp...](http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2011/02/AllYearsLanguages.jpg),
what Java did was no so much "retake the top" as "slide backwards, while
watching the languages previously above it slide back further." One might go
so far as to question whether "leadership" in a sinking market is a good
thing.

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btilly
If you read the comments you'll find out that this data is for physical book
sales across all publishers. Thus the decline of the overall market is almost
certainly evidence for the rise of e-books (including books on demand like
Safari) and not evidence that people are less interested in reading about
programming languages.

~~~
tjpick
I haven't been impressed by the technical offerings in the e-book market. The
titles are there, but whether it's the particular reader device I have or the
publishers fault, these books are terrible. Broken layout, slow load times due
to large chapter sizes and counts, not being able to easily flip to different
spots in the book, etc.

I'm sticking to dead trees for technical stuff.

(Novels, biographies etc on the other hand are great as ebooks)

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noelwelsh
No real surprises here, except perhaps the rise of Python and the decline of
Ruby. Note this undercounts sales for books covering the smaller languages. A
lot of these books are self published or sold outside mainstream channels and
so won't show up.

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dagw
Python sales where down 2010.

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noelwelsh
I was referring to the longer term trend over time, not just the difference
between 2009.

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lpolovets
Is anyone else really surprised that C# is a close second to Java? I'm trying
to think of why it would be so popular... the number of O'Reilly C# books? The
culture of .NET developers? (mild sarcasm) The ubiquity of C#? Something else?

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adolfojp
The last version of Java was released in 2006. Since then Microsoft has
released two new versions of C#, two new .NET frameworks, two new versions of
Visual Studio and a plethora of new libraries. People buy so many C# books
because there is so much new stuff to learn.

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wicknicks
Here is the Tiobe index, where again Java reigns:
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

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pauljonas
These statistics are a bit contrived — that is, a lot is determinant on What
O'Reilly decided to publish and promote in 2010.

Not going to spend the time to ferret out all the "recently published" for
2010, but I do not remember any notable PHP books - published. Granted, there
were some, but they do not appear to be offering anything not already in
existence, especially for a now mature platform.

Though, the decline of Objective C despite all the new titles might indicate
that the iOS platform has peaked for now.

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btilly
As is clarified in the comments, these statistics are aggregated for all
publishers, not just O'Reilly.

~~~
adw
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_BookScan>

(edited to add: is the canonical source of this kind of data)

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bobthedino
Funny how O'Reilly's own "Learning Java" book hasn't been updated since 2005,
though.

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jbooth
Well, in fairness, it's not like Java's been updated since about 2005 either
:) Java 7 might be the Duke Nukem Forever of programming language releases

