Last week’s entry, Pycon a Hiring Fest, and particularly a comment by Marc Hedlund about his preference for Ruby over Python, led to the inevitable “mine’s bigger than yours” in the comment thread. Seeing as how there’s so much passion in this subject, I thought I’d throw a little more fuel on the fire :-).
A week or so ago, Mike Hendrickson, who heads up our “Open Technology Exchange” group (which includes our animal book publishing program and the O’Reilly Network), sent me a graph comparing book sales on computer languages between January 2006 and January 2007.
As you can see, books on every language but Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL were down, some more than others. Ruby books did outsell Python books. But Javascript — driven by everything Ajax — was the biggest winner.
This data comes from the Bookscan top 3000 report. (Remember, this is data from all publishers, not just O’Reilly.)
More provocative stats later.