Comments on: 23 Programming Languages compared through their Amazon book sales

By: Bill Busen » Blog Archive » The Top 50 Code Bases

Bill Busen » Blog Archive » The Top 50 Code Bases — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 05:02:04 +0000

[...] Cangiano had a post I liked that did an estimation of programming language popularity by Amazon Rank of the bestselling corresponding book. OK, everybody that thinks of that as unscientific rather [...]

By: Garry

Garry — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:33:32 +0000

Nice work

By: Sindisil

Sindisil — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Though this is a somewhat silly way to compare languages, it is interesting. As an added data point:

Actionscript would rank even higher than JavaScript, since the book “Essential ActionScript 3.0″ by Colin Moock currently is at sales rank #346.

By: Adam Turoff

Adam Turoff — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Book sales are the model for the long tail; top sellers outsell competing titles by a huge margin. Although this pattern is true in general, you seem to be assuming that each top selling book outsells the second best selling book by a near constant factor.

The data is certainly more complex; if you were to look at the recent sales for the top 3 titles in Java vs. Ruby (for example), you might conclude that Ruby is much more important, even though the top selling Java book outsells the top selling Ruby book. Put differently, this ranking seems to indicate that JavaScript is only slightly more important than Java at the moment, but that doesn’t seem right.

On the other hand, this analysis ignores the fact that there’s a huge contingent of people who have already learned Java and don’t need to buy introductory books on Java; they’re busy buying the books in libraries and frameworks.

This data is certainly interesting, and offers a reasonable correlation with what’s going on in the industry. The O’Reilly State of the Computer Book Market series offers a deeper view into similar data, with more meaningful indicators.

By: Venkman

Venkman — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

While this list is a nice view and it can be discussed and thought about, I do think that some languages do take a penalization for available online documentation… but it depends on the quality of it.

As an example, the full first edition of Programming in Lua is available online. Not only this is the ‘official’ Lua book, but also there aren’t a lot of printed books on Lua. This pretty much reduces the options to reading the book online or buying that same book on print.

I’m also sure a lot of Pythonistas get Dive into Python on PDF and are happy with that. Some of the good Lisp books can be also found complete online in PDF.

By: rahul

rahul — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“practical common lisp” : sales rank 30581

By: Adam Fortuna

Adam Fortuna — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting analysis of things. Got me looking into where some of the languages I work with are in comparison…

Actionscript, 347, Rank #1
Flex, 8,655, Rank #11
ColdFusion, 12,793, Rank #14

I’d expect book numbers to be more in line “what’s hot” than “how many jobs are there for this topic” to some extent. But then again it could be a look at where things will be in the job market a few years down the line.

By: Kirill Grouchnikov

Kirill Grouchnikov — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

If SQL is a language, then HTML is too. Which would put “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML” at #1133 ahead of JavaScript.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@rahul

I missed that one, when I have some time I’ll amend the article to include it.

@Kirill

HTML is a markup language not a programming language, and as such it is not included in the list. Also, remember that the list is not complete by any means, so several languages will be missing.

By: Bill Busen

Bill Busen — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A way to eliminate the single, accepted reference vs. many acceptable books problem can be borrowed from cross-country scoring. Add the ranks of the first three (or five or whatever) books. Popular languages should have multiple good books out.