

State of the Computer Book Market, part 4: The Languages - maudlinmau5
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html

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droithomme
Hm, so one of their top sellers, "Head First Design Patters" is categorized as
a "Java Language book" because the code examples are in Java. And then Java is
declared the most popular language by overall book sales.

Is it still the top language when one does not include books in which the
examples happen to be in Java, but which are obviously not really primarily
about the language and are of use to users of other languages as well? That
question can not be answered with the information presented in the article.

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chromatic
_That question can not be answered with the information presented in the
article._

Most interesting questions can't be answered with the information presented in
the article. Bookscan doesn't measure _usage_ of programming languages.
Bookscan doesn't measure _demand_ of programming language books. The best it
can do is measure publisher efficiency at predicting what might sell--and
O'Reilly doesn't even give the necessary information to show that.

Most tech books have a maximum shelf half-life of eight months, and of course
once a book is off the shelves, it's really hard for Bookscan to measure its
sales.

