Java Leads Programming Language Popularity, by books sold?

http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/05/29/java-leads-programming-language-popularity/

by jjohns • 14 years ago

15 27 14 years ago

blog.jelastic.com

beothorn• 14 years ago

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

jiggy2011• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

cageface2• 14 years 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.

jbooth3• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

s/good reasons/unsurprising reasons/

umut• 14 years 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)

irahul3• 14 years 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/ this is better documentation than http://docs.python.org/library/random.html or 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.

muyuu• 14 years ago

It does fit my particular case. The languages I like the most and even use the most, I haven't bought any books about them.

Languages I despise, like Java and Javascript, I have bought the most books. I guess I wanted a streamlined experience to make it easier to swallow.

batista• 14 years ago

That's a rationalization, if I ever saw one.

Java has tons of documentation online, detailed API references, tutorials, etc. If there are many Java books, that's because of the demand for them and the language, not of some "mystic" BS quality the language has that needs more books.

For the same reason there are tons of Java jobs, many more than, say, Ruby jobs. It's not because "Java is more difficult and needs more programmers for the same task".

namidark• 14 years 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

edwinnathaniel2• 14 years 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 :)]

cageface2• 14 years ago

Head Fist Software Development

I know this is a typo but this is a book that really begs to be written.

gits1225• 14 years ago

It's not a typo. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596527358.do

electrum• 14 years ago

There are two books we recommend to every developer:

Effective Java: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/

Java Concurrency in Practice: 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/

Java Puzzlers (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.

edwinnathaniel2• 14 years ago

Better update the title with this one:

Java Performance: http://www.amazon.com/Java-Performance-Charlie-Hunt/dp/01371...

Java Puzzlers is helpful if you're doing low-level programming using Java. I find it to be less useful for app development.

Roritharr• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Java remains at the top, just behind C, of the trusted TIOBE index: 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• 14 years 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 It also shows the ruby market cooling off, which is consistent with recent stats for open source commit numbers.

Java Leads Programming Language Popularity, by books sold?

Related Stories