O’Reilly radar has an interesting graph of 2004 versus 2005 book sales for a variety of languages. The big news is that Ruby books sales are up 1552% and Java book sales are down 4%. This would be consistent with my observations from Why isn’t PHP the natural successor to Java. A small cadre of agile minded developers are giving Ruby a spin.
Meanwhile, there is no change in PHP book sales. Perhaps this suggests that Java is loosing to Ruby, but PHP is not? Or PHP is gaining from Perl, the other language with declining sales, just as fast as its loosing to Ruby? Perhaps you can’t read anything much at all into these numbers.
Also mentioned is that Java books outsell PHP books by 2.5x and PHP books outsell Ruby books by 3x.
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The only other thing to worry about is that percent changes look great when you come from a small base. If very few Ruby books were sold in 2004, then there still could be a 15x larger, but still very small number of books sold in 2005. There is absolutly some kind of a trend there, but it is very hard to get a grasp on it from the information presented.
A cynical person might point out that the PHP book market is saturated by many different publishers while Ruby represents a clean slate (perhaps not in Japan but certainly in the English speaking world) and so a great book sales opportunity so “buzz” it and sell.
I guess I should quit making those sort of remarks but…
By this time most people have already books on Java and PHP.. Combined with the facth that Ruby (and Rails) recieve a lot of attention i can understand people decide to buy a book and find out why it get’s this much attention..
Most people buying Ruby and Rails books are buying them from http://www.pragmaticprogrammers.com, to support Dave Thomas and friends.
O’Reilly doesn’t really have any good Ruby books IMHO.
That’s the first thing I noticed when I joined their Safari network !