Possibly inspired by articles like Tim O’Reilly’s State of the Computer Book Market (here are parts one, two, three and four of the Q1 2007 edition of this series) posts on the O’Reilly Radar blog, Antonio Cangiano decided to do a little research of his own:
Technical books are a topic that interest me a lot. From book sale figures and trends we can attempt to better understand where developers are putting their money, not only their mouths. For this article I decided to perform a small experiment, by collecting some interesting data. I considered 23 fairly well known programming languages, and searched for the top selling book (according to Amazon) for each of them. The Amazon sales rank allows us to compare the success of books representative of each language, and indirectly compare the popularity of the languages themselves.
The Top Ranking Languages
According to Antonio’s research, here are the best-selling programming language books are for these languages, listed starting with the best seller:
- JavaScript (JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Amazon rank 1,227)
- Java (Head First Java, Amazon rank 1,799)
- Ruby (Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Amazon rank 1,881)
- SQL (Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Amazon rank 1,929)
To see the top 23 programming languages based on Amazon ranking, go visit Antonio’s blog entry.
A commenter on the article wrote:
Actionscript would rank even higher than JavaScript, since the book Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock currently is at sales rank #346.
Interesting Languages
There are some interesting languages on this list. Although they get mentioned on Reddit and a number of developer blogs, they’re not quite mainstream yet. In spite of that, they’ve placed quite well based on Amazon’s ranking system:
- Erlang (Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World, #12 on the list, Amazon rank 8,609)
- F# (Foundations of F#, #15 on the list, Amazon rank 21,273)
- Lua (Programming in Lua, #16 on the list, Amazon rank 23,052)
- Haskell (The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming, #18 on the list, Amazon rank 1,929)
[Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog]