Notes on O'Reilly Radar's State of the Computer Book Market

For the past several years one of my favorite places to track programming language trends has been the "State of the Computer Book Market" series on O'Reilly Radar.

O'Reilly's Mike Hendrickson dives deep again this year into the statistics and details of the computer book market in a 5-part series:

1. State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market
2. State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 2: The Technologies
3. State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 3: The Publishers
4. State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4: The Languages
5. State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 5: eBooks and Summary

My high level summary:

• While general book sales were up YoY in 2008 (+30%), computer book sales were down (-8%) with a weak Q3 and Q4.
• The only computer book category to grow in 2008 was Consumer Operating Systems, driven by sales of Mac OS X and iPhone books.
• The top sellers in the Systems and Programming category were in C#, Mac Programming, and Virtualization. Software Project Management, Windows Administration, and Software Design books were all down.
• C# book sales continued to grow for the 4th straight year, passing sales of Java books for the first time (which have been sliding for 5 straight years).
• C/C++ and Visual Basic book sales both posted their 5th and 4th straight declines, respectively.
• Python rose for the 5th straight year, as did ActionScript (4th straight gain), whereas JavaScript book sales fell for the 3rd straight year.
• Online e-book sales (often direct to consumer) are growing strong relative to the overall market

Languages ranked by 2008 book sales (%market share, relative to 2007 rank):

1. C# - 15.58% (‰ Ô)
2. Java - 12.09% (‰ Ò)
3. PHP - 9.93% (䈚)
4. JavaScript - 9.89% (‰ Ò)
5. C/C++ - 8.36% (‰ Ò)
6. ActionScript - 5.76% (䈚)
7. .NET Languages - 5.40% (‰ Ò)
8. VisualBasic - 5.04% (‰ Ò)
9. SQL - 4.57% (‰ Ò)
10. Ruby - 3.51% (‰ Ò)
11. Python - 3.41% (‰ Ô)
12. VBA - 3.18% (‰ Ò)
13. Objective-C - 2.56% (䈚)
14. Perl - 2.14% (‰ Ò)

The most telling charts from the series:

2008 Market Share by Language:

A Treemap view of the Programming Languages:

Percentage of 5 Year Sales Per Quarter by Media Type:

(Images copyright O'Reilly Media, and used without asking permission first -- will definitely take them down if necessary.)

Mike goes into far more detail on each topic over on Radar. Start reading the series here.