Well, it's over. Grails beats Rails: As Michael Yuan points out, three Groovy and Grails books were in the top ten sellers at JavaOne. No Ruby or Rails books made the cut.
Read that again. Groovy and Grails are kicking some serious Ruby Rails ass. I like both stacks, but frankly the JavaOne numbers do not match my impression of what people are up to. Let's double check that against the Amazon rankings:
Programming Ruby is currently #1,731 on Amazon, and did not make the top 15 at JavaOne.
Agile Web Development with Rails is currently #531 on Amazon, and did not make the top 15 at JavaOne.
The Definitive Guide to Grails is currently #24,375 on Amazon, and was #4 at JavaOne at the time of Michael's post.
Hmmm. So maybe Grails does a lot better only at a Java-specific events. Not too surprising. But actually, we don't even know that. As it turns out, the Pragmatic Press books were not for sale at JavaOne. After my talk, attendees followed me to the bookstore asking what to buy, and I told them to wait until they got home.
I guess winning the battle of statistics is about choosing the battleground.
[Editor's note: Stuart Halloway, the author of this post, is the best selling Java book author ever, among Duke graduates with the initials SDH. Take that, David Geary!]
Comments
Hi Stuart,
I agree 120% that statistics need to be considered in context—I am sure none of the Java books will be a top seller in the upcoming Ruby conf. :) And the JavaOne crowd is quite different from the average software developer. There are a lot of mobility people there and many marketing people.
However, I’d think that JavaOne attendees are more inclined to explore new technologies than the average Joe developer. So, it is still somewhat surprising to see the lack of interest in JRuby / Rails despite heavy marketing from Sun. Maybe it will change after JRuby actually hits a stable release. We will see. :)
cheers Michael
Perhaps I was too subtle in the original post. We cannot use JavaOne book sales as a proxy for developer interest in Rails, because the best-selling Ruby and Rails books were not for sale at JavaOne.
Hi Stuart,
I’m not sure anyone was taking the statitistics out of context. Fact is Ruby and Rails appeals to a wide range of people from ex-Perlers to PHP people to (what we thought ;-) Java people.
Groovy and Grails are likely to only appeal to Java people. However, Java developers represent 3 million developers worldwide, and JavaOne (15000 people) overshadows most other tech conferences which struggle to break a 1000 people.
As, Michael mentioned the fact that those who were at JavaOne and able to make an informed decision for the most part chose Groovy and Grails and completely ignored Ruby/Rails is surprising. And btw Groovy in Action is #6,585 and climbing, which ain’t bad as far as Java books go. Java Persistence with Hibernate is at #2,238 for example.
Stu
Her’s some hard data http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_10.html
Ruby book sales are doing very well, Groovy book sales aren’t bad seeing as there were no Groovy books available Q4 2006 and Manning seems to take forever to deliver Groovy in Action (at least in Europe). It will be interesting to see what the Q2 figures tell us about the velocity.