The biggest event for Java in 2010 was Oracle's acquisition of Sun. It may actually turn out to be a positive thing for Java, to be owned by a company that knows how to make money, as opposed to a company that knows how to make great technology. I've been worried sick about Java, so this turnaround is a great relief.
But the 3rd best-selling title was Professional Android 2 Application Development, so that's certainly a factor.
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.
I wonder how much of that is due to the popularity of the language and how much is due to other publishers. I have 4 Ruby books, 3 of them are from the Pragmatic Bookshelf and the other is O'Reilly. For C# stuff, I'd probably start with O'Reilly, but for anything Ruby, PB is usually my first (and last) stop.
If you look at http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2011/02/AllYearsLanguages.jp..., 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.
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.
The report would have at least some use if it accounted for the freshness of titles (given the short snout of sales), the number of titles published in a year, and the title efficiency.
(Then again, I've made this criticism year after year, so I've come to take the report as chartjunk with slightly better data than TIOBE.)
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.
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)
C# is the number one tagged language on stackoverflow.com. I wonder if there is some tenuous correlation there. I'm not sure I'd ever buy a programming language book now.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 66.9 ms ] threadBut the 3rd best-selling title was Professional Android 2 Application Development, so that's certainly a factor.
[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2011/02/prog_lang_tree.jpg
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.
(edited to add: is the canonical source of this kind of data)
The report would have at least some use if it accounted for the freshness of titles (given the short snout of sales), the number of titles published in a year, and the title efficiency.
(Then again, I've made this criticism year after year, so I've come to take the report as chartjunk with slightly better data than TIOBE.)
I'm sticking to dead trees for technical stuff.
(Novels, biographies etc on the other hand are great as ebooks)
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.
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...