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Trends in sales of programming language books (and some lamenting)

O'Reilly Radar reports statistics on programming language books sales for January 2006 and 2007. Java is still king with > 20% of all sales despite a decrease of 5% or so since last year. It seems the trend is that Ajax and Web 2.0 related languages are increasing. JavaScript is up from 5% to almost 15% which may seam a bit strange but as Tim rightly says: "it is driven by Ajax". Ruby is up from nothing to a bit over 5%. SQL also is up which probably is because web developers now connect directly with the database by means of PHP and Rails. All interesting stuff.

I don't know if I like the JavaScript trend but Ruby combined with SQL is truly a step forward for us developers. Maybe there will be nicer to be a developer in a couple of years when the "enterprise" thing has calmed down. (Oh - I forgot - there will be some other thing that will appear and make all managers go WOW and LETS BUY IT and suddenly us poor developers will be stuck in some new enterprise nightmare that probably is supposed to integrate with all the old technologies we already built ourselves into. Where I work now the set of IT systems is a mixture of Unisys mainframes, Oracle Forms, VB on top of Tuxedo and the full J2EE stack with a homegrown framework. The problem is that the old technologies are never removed - new ones just adds on to them making the network of system impossible to understand.)

Old comments

2007-03-08Hardy Ferentschik
Regarding the rise of Ruby there is another interesting fact on the Ruby homepage:"The TIOBE index, which measures the growth of programming languages, ranks Ruby as #11 among programming languages worldwide. Citing its growth, they predict, “Chances are that Ruby will enter the top 10 within half a year.”".
Well, a quick check of the index shows that the prediction is reality now. Ruby is now the #10. Of course this growth is mainly thanks to the growing popularity of Ruby on Rails.