Book sales is probably not the most accurate measure for the usage of different programming languages, but with no doubt, the sales of books is strongly correlated with the interest and uptake of the languages. I found it very interesting to see a recent publication on O’Reilly’s radar by Mike Hendrickson, discussing the state of the Computer Book Market in 2008.
While the overall market for programming books was down 5.9% during 2008 certain books for programming languages are still experiencing healthy growth. Amongst the books that fall into that category are books for programming languages such as C#, PHP, ActionScript, and Python. These programming language books were selling more books then in the year before, despite the decrease in overall book sales. On the other hand, over the last few years we could also see a decline in book sales for languages such as Ruby, Java, and C++ to just name the most prominent ones.
Furthermore, for the first year, C# outsold Java books and this trend seems to continue this year.
For the complete article go to:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-22.html
Well, I've been noticing C# picking up pace around here. I work in a java/linux shop, but I've been seeing a lot of notices for C# work in my inbox. Interesting.