Java Leads Programming Language Popularity, by books sold?
blog.jelastic.com
blog.jelastic.com
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.
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.
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)
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.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/index.html
Additionally, if you actually page through the Java API documentation, many packages contain overviews describing rationale and how everything fits together- hardly a "dump of class hierarchies with some comments". For example,
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/awt/doc-fi...
Personally I think having both a tutorial and browsable API documentation is preferable to dealing with unstructured prose for everything.
If you are already a programmer, you will be able to complete this tutorial in less than 2 hours http://docs.python.org/tutorial/, and can start programming Python. Want to learn Perl? http://www.perltutorial.org/. This tutorial thing isn't something that is unique to java, and personally, I find the Perl and Python versions higher quality compared to Java's tutorial.
> Personally I think having both a tutorial and browsable API documentation is preferable to dealing with unstructured prose for everything.
Unstructured prose for everything? What are we talking about? How is http://docs.python.org/library/random.html (description, methods and usage, example code) unstructured prose? When it comes down to which doc is better, it comes down to personal preference. But Java has the best online documentation is far from the truth.
Personal preferences aside, I would say Python/Perl docs are as good as, if not better, than the Java docs. Ruby's documentation is not as good, but rails documentation is very good http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ For C, we have the man pages(though archaic, they are pretty good). My point is I don't see how Java leads in terms of online documentation.
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.
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".
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.
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 :)]
I know this is a typo but this is a book that really begs to be written.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.