Programming Books, Mostly Not By Me

Noel Rappin, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 @ 11:13 am

Thanks, Ivan for starting this conversation, and giving me a reason to talk about the book market. I pour over the O'Reilly posts on the state of the computer book market like they were baseball cards of my favorite Cubbies. Naturally, I couldn't resist unleashing my inner Bill James on the numbers.

First off, though, while it's tempting to read a lot into these numbers, they are only a very rough proxy for actual usage of the various languages. Sometimes the book numbers precede actual usage as a new language builds up mindshare, then gets used in projects. Sometimes the book numbers trail actual usage, because publishing has a pretty long lead time before books can actually enter the market.

That said, if you're looking for a language that's going to be way up in 2008, my money is on Objective-C. Two words: Cocoa. Touch. Although it's not clear to me how quickly an iPhone specific book could even get published.

With respect to the specifics of the Java market, I'd guess that the reasons for the sales drop have to do with a relatively quiet year in new stories about Java the language combined with a general push to explore more dynamic languages.

To Ivan's larger point about developers spending a mostly fixed amount on books, the overall average for the top languages is about 1100 sales per title, and that doesn't seem to have any correlation with the size of the larger market. That's been the rough size of the market for the last three years, which is (again citing O'Reilly) about half the size of the market in 2000.

What the data shows to me is that the publishers do a much better job than I would have expected of matching the market. The more popular languages get more books published about them, especially once the market gets large enough to support more advanced or niche books. It seems like per-title sales are higher on languages that are growing, which would reflect the lag time before new books can come out -- expect to see a lot of Ruby books in 2008. Like this one (couldn't resist).

What programming books really changed how you work or improved your code? Or just taught something cleanly and clearly?

Related posts:

1. Programming Languages, O’Reilly & The State Of Java
2. At Last, We Give Away Books
3. Social Network Analysis of Ajax Books
4. How to learn a new programming language or framework
5. Free Book Redux

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