According to the survey done by O'Reilly, Javascript and PHP continues to lead in the book sales, while Python and actionscript are in the last position. There is a considerable rise in the book sales for Ruby as they have now passed sales for Perl books as well (they passed book sales for Python in the last year). Book sales statistics shows the dominance of Javascript and PHP, does that indicate the popularity?
If you compare the last year’s statistics with this year then you will find PHP is doing steady progress while there is a considerable rise in the book sales as well as job postings with Ruby and Javascript. The main reason could be ROR for Ruby and AJAX for Javascript. ROR and AJAX made the huge difference, What made them so rocking ?As far as AJAX is concerned, the technology it self was not new but Google implemented it and made it popular, one of the major reason behind ROR's popularity is the aggressive marketing.
The reason for developers to look at Ruby was definitely RoR and not Ruby itself. A lot of developers were tending to hear about Python than about Ruby, so a lot of them shifted to Python. Now, Its likely to have heard about Ruby so the current picture shows that the developers go in the direction of Ruby. Although Turbogears, Django, Plone, Zope are doing well but they are not rocking as ROR (compared to Ruby not much books are available on Turbogears, Django, Plone) Ruby concentrated on product development as well as marketing while Python is not concentrating on the marketing part.
There's an interesting comment posted on Tim's article, comment is, "Maybe they need more books since the documentation is so poor...". Well, I would not like to comment on it but you can not judge the popularity based on book sales statistics. Although Python stands last in the book sales, that doesn’t indicate that Python is not popular, it certainly is, but they are lacking the pace which could be gained by aggressive marketing. I am eager to see some good books on Iron Python, Python in the mobile sector (Python+Nokia), Python 3000. On release of these books we will definitely see the rise in Python book sales.
Python is so simple that one can keep most of the language and standard library in your head. So, not much need for books (at least not language references). Instead of looking at book sales or killer apps, a better indication of popularity is the number of third-party modules and Python doesn't seem to be lacking in that area!
Posted by steve, on 08/10/2006 at 04:34
No. Python is just having a drought in the book scene right now, the same time that Ruby (Rails mostly) is having a bit of a boom. I am sure that Q4 and Q1 of 2007 will look quite a bit different from now. (e.g. both TurboGears and Django have a book coming out)
Posted by maetro, on 08/08/2006 at 04:46
We python programmers don't read python books, because it's so simply, the manual is enough. Sales doesn't indicate popularity, but indicated how difficult, how complex is the language.
Posted by dh, on 08/08/2006 at 03:15
The online doc is more than enough. The current boom of Ruby sales is due to the fact that it's
Posted by Bader, on 08/08/2006 at 12:26
Yeah, i do feel like it has been a while since a truly essential Python book has come out. I prefer printed books when possible, but the number of books offering in-depth information (ie, not stuff available all over the web) seems to have dropped off.
Posted by Ed Gordon, on 08/08/2006 at 11:27
O'Reilly has only about 10 titles; have of them are 5 years old or more. Of the remaining, 2 are reference books - who needs those with Python Docs? No wonder sales suck!
Posted by Bart, on 08/08/2006 at 06:50
Rails and AJAX are the killer apps that are driving interest in Ruby and Javascript. What is the killer app for Python? Sad to say, but, I don't think there is one.
Posted by lyncher, on 08/08/2006 at 06:44
Answer: No, it just suggests python's builtin documentation and documentation server (pydoc -p 9000) is, in a word, kickass ;)
Posted by kumar303, on 08/07/2006 at 11:20
I haven' t purchased any Python books lately because I just don't feel the need. Of the three or four that I have already, I only ever refer to David Mertz's
Posted by infidel, on 08/07/2006 at 07:53
Take the number of titles in each categories and then divide the sale numbers by the title numbers. You will have something that you can compare as it will be normalized in terms of popularity.
Aka, There are not many books about Python in general.
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