Book Data Spells the Demise of Java
Well at least that what is being said by Wally McClure over at MoreWally.com. He’s commenting in his podcast on my post on the O’Reilly Q2 book data and how the -10% for Java books is indicative of the general state of Java. I think though that the following comment from O’Reilly director of research Roger Magoulas in the original post sheds some light on the numbers:
I’ll point out another example of why book results require careful analysis: The new Microsoft products released in Nov 2005, C# 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (I’m skipping Visual Basic 2005 - so far gone it doesn’t register) show big increases in book sales. When we look at the job data we don’t see any corresponding changes. We also don’t see much overlap between Windows and other development environments (e.g., ~14% of Windows .Net oriented job postings also include Java). So, our conclusion is that the new version - the first in five years - generated a lot of developer interest in Windows shops, but doesn’t represent a trend towards increased use of Microsoft products.
The other thing to note is that Java 5, probably the biggest Java release since Java 1.2, had it’s first beta in early February 2004 and it was released in September 2004. This means that book sales for Java 5 would have been going strong in Q2 2005. A year later Java 5 is old news with Java 6 not yet released and so the year on year book sales have declined.
I’m predicting that in Q1or Q2 next year when the Microsoft November 2005 release book bubble has passed that the O’Reilly numbers will show massive declines in .Net book sales prompting predictions of .Net’s demise.
What do they say about statistics?
