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State of the Computer Book Market, part 4: The Languages
- droithomme 15y agoHm, so one of their top sellers, "Head First Design Patters" is categorized as a "Java Language book" because the code examples are in Java. And then Java is declared the most popular language by overall book sales. Is it still the top language when one does not include books in which the examples happen to be in Java, but which are obviously not really primarily about the language and are of use to users of other languages as well? That question can not be answered with the information presented in the article.
- gauravk92 15y agoIn that situation don't most authors use some pseudocode anyway(?) since the point isn't to be syntactically correct but to express the concept in a way that can be understood by as many people as possible. I don't know why anyone would want to write java to express programming concepts, better left to python or ruby where real code basically looks like pseudocode.
- chromatic 15y agoThat question can not be answered with the information presented in the article. Most interesting questions can't be answered with the information presented in the article. Bookscan doesn't measure usage of programming languages. Bookscan doesn't measure demand of programming language books. The best it can do is measure publisher efficiency at predicting what might sell--and O'Reilly doesn't even give the necessary information to show that. Most tech books have a maximum shelf half-life of eight months, and of course once a book is off the shelves, it's really hard for Bookscan to measure its sales.