There is an interesting article over at O’reilly Radar on the State of the Computer Book Market, Q206 which gives some figures on the popularity of various technologies based on the value of books sold in Q2 2006. Along with the analysis there are some really cool treemaps showing the trends.
If the figures are to be believed, Java is down, .Net is up and Ajax technologies are hot, especially Javascript and Ruby. The in depth analysis by O’Reilly suggests that books tend to reflect things that are new better than existing popular technologies so this isn’t a harbinger of a Microsoft slam dunk on the technology front but does shed some light on what you see on bookshelves. Book sales seem to be the opposite of the long tail.
The other interesting trend is the popularity of books on blogging and podcasting, technologies that have been around for a while (this blog has been going for 3 years in one form or another) and yet seem to be undergoing something of a rennaisance in the book world. I’m certainly seeing the shape of blogging changing from some sort of day to day diary to something more serious, maybe because of the podcasts I’m listening to.
As for my own book buying future the next book I have on order is Getting Things Done by David Allen which is an attempt on my part to attack my lack of organization and focus. After that I’m thinking that the new Groovy in Action book is a must have and maybe some books on Javascript or CSS. Now all I have to do is make room in my life to read all these books. Hopefully the GTD book will help with that.
[Listening to: You’re Everything - Planet Shakers - Reflector (4:44)]
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on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under tech.
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There is an interesting article over at O’reilly Radar on the State of the Computer Book Market, Q206 which gives some figures on the popularity of various technologies based on the value of books sold in Q2 2006. Along with the analysis there are some really cool treemaps showing the trends.
If the figures are to be believed, Java is down, .Net is up and Ajax technologies are hot, especially Javascript and Ruby. The in depth analysis by O’Reilly suggests that books tend to reflect things that are new better than existing popular technologies so this isn’t a harbinger of a Microsoft slam dunk on the technology front but does shed some light on what you see on bookshelves. Book sales seem to be the opposite of the long tail.
The other interesting trend is the popularity of books on blogging and podcasting, technologies that have been around for a while (this blog has been going for 3 years in one form or another) and yet seem to be undergoing something of a rennaisance in the book world. I’m certainly seeing the shape of blogging changing from some sort of day to day diary to something more serious, maybe because of the podcasts I’m listening to.
As for my own book buying future the next book I have on order is Getting Things Done by David Allen which is an attempt on my part to attack my lack of organization and focus. After that I’m thinking that the new Groovy in Action book is a must have and maybe some books on Javascript or CSS. Now all I have to do is make room in my life to read all these books. Hopefully the GTD book will help with that.
[Listening to: You’re Everything - Planet Shakers - Reflector (4:44)]
This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 11:15 pm and is filed under tech.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
