In this fourth post (posts one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall, the market for programming languages was down -6.27% in 2010 when compared with 2009. There were 6,303,125 units sold in 2009 versus 5,931,452 units sold in 2010, which is a decrease of -371,673 units. Java experienced the biggest gain in units, at 28,633 more units in 2010 than 2009, while PHP occupied the opposite end with the biggest decrease at 38,614 fewer units year-over-year.

Before we begin to drill in on the languages, we thought it would be best to explain our "language dimension." When we group books by their language dimension, we categorize them by the language used in …

In this second installment (the first post can be found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" — Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Computer Topics. Within each of these Families are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes the category groups programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on. In the rest of this post, we will contrast the final quarter of 2010 with 2009 as well as the whole year of 2009 with 2010.

As a refresher, here is a new treemap of the Category Families, with their sub-areas for the final quarters of 2010 compared …

When we first started selling O'Reilly ebooks on Kindle, the limitations of the device prevented us from including our full catalog of ebooks. The first generation Kindle wasn't able to display tables or computer code -- two classes of content that are obviously quite common in O'Reilly books.

Although we (and our authors!) had hoped that Amazon would update the software on those Kindles (especially since many O'Reilly readers are also typically early adopters of new devices and technologies), it's clear that Amazon is focusing their efforts on their newer devices and apps for other mobile devices like iPad and Android.

Amazon won't disclose any data about how many customers use specific Kindle devices or apps, but we believe the number of Kindle 1 users is a small and shrinking part of the overall Kindle user base, and since there are multiple additional apps and desktop readers from Amazon, with a few specific exceptions …

An unusual href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/calendar/13300733/">Distributed
Distributed Work Meetup was held last night in four different
cities simultaneously, arranged through many hours of hard work by href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/members/9584137/">Lukas
Biewald and his colleagues at distributed work provider href="http://crowdflower.com/">CrowdFlower.

With all the sharing of experiences and the on-the-spot analyses
taking place, I didn't find an occasion to ask my most pressing
question, so I'll put it here and ask my readers for comments:

How can you set up crowdsourcing where most people work for free but
some are paid, and present it to participants in a way that makes it
seem fair?

This situation arises all the time, with paid participants such as
application developers and community …

1. Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
2. SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
3. …

1. NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. …

Today High Performance MySQL, Second Edition went to press. I’ve been working with the production team over the last couple of weeks, proofreading and checking the index and working with the artist who re-drew the illustrations.

I spoke to the production editor this morning and she told me the schedule is for the bound-book date to be the 16th of June. The official in-stock date is June 19th. I don’t know how many copies they’re printing for the first printing. But I think there have been a lot of pre-orders (rumors I’ve heard from my Amazon Affiliate account).

I cannot wait to hold my copy in my hands!

Publishing