8 ms·

Java Leads Programming Language Popularity, by books sold?

15 points by jjohns 14y ago

beothorn 14y ago
err...no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
jiggy2011 14y ago
One obvious reason for this would be that colleges/universities very often teach Java as the main language and will usually encourage students to buy at least one or two books on the subject. Another reason is that Java projects will often use some fairly heavy frameworks like hibernate, which can be great to work with if you really understand how they work. The best way to do this is to make sure you have the definitive book on your shelf as you are in for a world of pain if you just try to "wing it" like you would with PHP.
- efa 14y ago
  And also Java is very popular in large corporations (at least in my experience in the Financial Services sector). These companies have large staffs and lots of money. They'll send whole teams to training classes (which includes books). While working for these large companies I thought the whole world was Java/Spring/Hibernate. Now that I work on my own (and have started spending more time on HN) I see there is a totally different picture for the startup/consulting world. BTW, scanning GitHub to determine language popularity seems ridiculous to me. What percent of larger corporations use GitHub (less then 5% I would guess).
Tloewald 14y ago
There's probably a property of programming languages that connotes to the ratio of books needed to code written which Java scores highly in. That and the huge number of people forced to learn Java and buy books on it. At the opposite end would be languages that are easier to work with, have incredibly good online documentation, and/or for which a book industry has not yet materialized.
- cageface 14y ago
  Listings for Java programmers significantly outnumber those for any other language on all the job boards I've checked. I'm not persuaded that some other intangible is driving book sales.
- jbooth 14y ago
  It's hard to find any language that has better online documentation than Java. Java as a language is dominant in universities (for debatable reasons) and in average-boring-industry shops and at high-scale shops, both for very good reasons. There's going to be a lot of books sold because of that.
  - famousactress 14y ago
    s/good reasons/unsurprising reasons/
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - umut 14y ago
    perfect reply, definitely agree with the points stated... For a scrappy startup, it may not mean much since it is verbose and idioms are a bit ugly-ish at first. But as startups grow into real businesses, the developer productivity and maintainability versus performance makes Java one of the best options available today. JVM is really one good piece of software and against all the preconceptions, java is a really nice language to build large scale systems... // been a java developer for around 10 years, and any other language i have used (a lot of them) disappointed me in one way (productivity) or another (performance)
  - irahul 14y ago
    > It's hard to find any language that has better online documentation than Java. I don't see how http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/ this is better documentation than http://docs.python.org/library/random.html http://docs.python.org/library/random.html or http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html Java docs are mostly a dump of class hierarchies with some comments documenting the functions. Python and Perl docs are written as user guides compared to Java api dumps.
namidark 14y ago
I can't tell the difference between Ruby, VBA, Perl, and SQL at first glance... instead I have to count columns and figure out where a language is
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
I find this statistics to be interesting because technically, outside Android, there's probably not too many new books about Java published by O'reilly unlike in the early 2000 when Java for the web and enterprise exploded. On the flip side, Head First Design Patterns, Head First OOP, Head First Software Development are all using Java and the Head First series seems to replace the "For Dummies" series for beginner's book (don't get me wrong, I love Head First series because the series attempts to write book from a different angle and it does make sure you remember what you read, just like in the classroom). Last but not least, O'reilly has the best selection of JavaScript books out there compare to other publisher. [edited typo :)]
- cageface 14y ago
  Head Fist Software Development I know this is a typo but this is a book that really begs to be written.
  - gits1225 14y ago
    It's not a typo. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596527358.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596527358.do
    - freehunter 14y ago
      The link describes it as "Head First Software Development". The OP described it as "Head Fist".
- electrum 14y ago
  There are two books we recommend to every developer: Effective Java: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/ http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/ Java Concurrency in Practice: http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ Everything else is covered by the excellent online documentation, including the language and VM specification books: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/ http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/ Java Puzzlers (http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ http://www.javapuzzlers.com/) is a fun read that highlights many corner cases of the language and might be helpful for code reviews and debugging.
Roritharr 14y ago
It's sad that learning from books doesn't work like osmosis. If the amount of books i've bought would equate with the number of books I've read I probably would be a more rounded coder... Is it common to have atleast 5 times the amount of unread coding books in comparison to the read ones? There are surely lots of Java books bought by students who drop out after the first semester...
Feoh 14y ago
I don't think these results correlate at all to the popularity of a given programming language in use in the field. For instance, pretty much ever since the language's ascendance to popularity, a visit to the bookstore will yield a veritable WALL of Java books, most of them bound for obsolescence within a year, or two, max. Sure, this happens with other programming languages too, but the constant churn of frameworks, libraries and infrastructure that happens in the Java world is a boon for book publishers.
readme 14y ago
Java remains at the top, just behind C, of the trusted TIOBE index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... This is not a surprise at all. Java is huge. Sorry to everyone who doesn't like it. It's just a current fact of the industry.
thebluesky 14y ago
Interesting trends, which likely match reality wrt the the decline of visual basic and perl, and the rise of python http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_allYears.jpg http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_allYears.jpg It also shows the ruby market cooling off, which is consistent with recent stats for open source commit numbers.

15 points by jjohns 14y ago

err...no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

jiggy2011 14y ago

One obvious reason for this would be that colleges/universities very often teach Java as the main language and will usually encourage students to buy at least one or two books on the subject. Another reason is that Java projects will often use some fairly heavy frameworks like hibernate, which can be great to work with if you really understand how they work. The best way to do this is to make sure you have the definitive book on your shelf as you are in for a world of pain if you just try to "wing it" like you would with PHP.

efa 14y ago
And also Java is very popular in large corporations (at least in my experience in the Financial Services sector). These companies have large staffs and lots of money. They'll send whole teams to training classes (which includes books). While working for these large companies I thought the whole world was Java/Spring/Hibernate. Now that I work on my own (and have started spending more time on HN) I see there is a totally different picture for the startup/consulting world. BTW, scanning GitHub to determine language popularity seems ridiculous to me. What percent of larger corporations use GitHub (less then 5% I would guess).

Tloewald 14y ago

There's probably a property of programming languages that connotes to the ratio of books needed to code written which Java scores highly in. That and the huge number of people forced to learn Java and buy books on it. At the opposite end would be languages that are easier to work with, have incredibly good online documentation, and/or for which a book industry has not yet materialized.

cageface 14y ago
Listings for Java programmers significantly outnumber those for any other language on all the job boards I've checked. I'm not persuaded that some other intangible is driving book sales.
jbooth 14y ago
It's hard to find any language that has better online documentation than Java. Java as a language is dominant in universities (for debatable reasons) and in average-boring-industry shops and at high-scale shops, both for very good reasons. There's going to be a lot of books sold because of that.
- famousactress 14y ago
  s/good reasons/unsurprising reasons/
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- umut 14y ago
  perfect reply, definitely agree with the points stated... For a scrappy startup, it may not mean much since it is verbose and idioms are a bit ugly-ish at first. But as startups grow into real businesses, the developer productivity and maintainability versus performance makes Java one of the best options available today. JVM is really one good piece of software and against all the preconceptions, java is a really nice language to build large scale systems... // been a java developer for around 10 years, and any other language i have used (a lot of them) disappointed me in one way (productivity) or another (performance)
- irahul 14y ago
  > It's hard to find any language that has better online documentation than Java. I don't see how http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/ this is better documentation than http://docs.python.org/library/random.html http://docs.python.org/library/random.html or http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html Java docs are mostly a dump of class hierarchies with some comments documenting the functions. Python and Perl docs are written as user guides compared to Java api dumps.

namidark 14y ago

I can't tell the difference between Ruby, VBA, Perl, and SQL at first glance... instead I have to count columns and figure out where a language is

edwinnathaniel 14y ago

I find this statistics to be interesting because technically, outside Android, there's probably not too many new books about Java published by O'reilly unlike in the early 2000 when Java for the web and enterprise exploded. On the flip side, Head First Design Patterns, Head First OOP, Head First Software Development are all using Java and the Head First series seems to replace the "For Dummies" series for beginner's book (don't get me wrong, I love Head First series because the series attempts to write book from a different angle and it does make sure you remember what you read, just like in the classroom). Last but not least, O'reilly has the best selection of JavaScript books out there compare to other publisher. [edited typo :)]

cageface 14y ago
Head Fist Software Development I know this is a typo but this is a book that really begs to be written.
- gits1225 14y ago
  It's not a typo. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596527358.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596527358.do
  - freehunter 14y ago
    The link describes it as "Head First Software Development". The OP described it as "Head Fist".
electrum 14y ago
There are two books we recommend to every developer: Effective Java: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/ http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/ Java Concurrency in Practice: http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ Everything else is covered by the excellent online documentation, including the language and VM specification books: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/ http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/ Java Puzzlers (http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ http://www.javapuzzlers.com/) is a fun read that highlights many corner cases of the language and might be helpful for code reviews and debugging.

Roritharr 14y ago

It's sad that learning from books doesn't work like osmosis. If the amount of books i've bought would equate with the number of books I've read I probably would be a more rounded coder... Is it common to have atleast 5 times the amount of unread coding books in comparison to the read ones? There are surely lots of Java books bought by students who drop out after the first semester...

Feoh 14y ago

I don't think these results correlate at all to the popularity of a given programming language in use in the field. For instance, pretty much ever since the language's ascendance to popularity, a visit to the bookstore will yield a veritable WALL of Java books, most of them bound for obsolescence within a year, or two, max. Sure, this happens with other programming languages too, but the constant churn of frameworks, libraries and infrastructure that happens in the Java world is a boon for book publishers.

readme 14y ago

Java remains at the top, just behind C, of the trusted TIOBE index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... This is not a surprise at all. Java is huge. Sorry to everyone who doesn't like it. It's just a current fact of the industry.

thebluesky 14y ago

Interesting trends, which likely match reality wrt the the decline of visual basic and perl, and the rise of python http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_allYears.jpg http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_allYears.jpg It also shows the ruby market cooling off, which is consistent with recent stats for open source commit numbers.