Does the crash in Python book sales reflect the popularity of Python?

According to the survey done by O’Reilly, Javascript and PHP continues to lead in the book sales, while Python and actionscript are in the last position. There is a considerable rise in the book sales for Ruby as they have now passed sales for Perl books as well (they passed book sales for Python in the last year). Book sales statistics shows the dominance of Javascript and PHP, does that indicate the popularity?

If you compare the last year’s statistics with this year then you will find PHP is doing steady progress while there is a considerable rise in the book sales as well as job postings with Ruby and Javascript. The main reason could be ROR for Ruby and AJAX for Javascript. ROR and AJAX made the huge difference, What made them so rocking ?As far as AJAX is concerned, the technology it self was not new but Google implemented it and made it popular, one of the major reason behind ROR’s popularity is the aggressive marketing.

The reason for developers to look at Ruby was definitely RoR and not Ruby itself. A lot of developers were tending to hear about Python than about Ruby, so a lot of them shifted to Python. Now, Its likely to have heard about Ruby so the current picture shows that the developers go in the direction of Ruby. Although Turbogears, Django, Plone, Zope are doing well but they are not rocking as ROR (compared to Ruby not much books are available on Turbogears, Django, Plone)  Ruby concentrated on product development as well as marketing while Python is not concentrating on the marketing part.

There’s an interesting comment posted on Tim’s article, comment is, “Maybe they need more books since the documentation is so poor…”. Well, I would not like to comment on it but you can not judge the popularity based on book sales statistics. Although Python stands last in the book sales, that doesn’t indicate that Python is not popular, it certainly is, but they are lacking the pace which could be gained by aggressive marketing. I am eager to see some good books on Iron Python, Python in the mobile sector (Python+Nokia), Python 3000. On release of these books we will definitely see the rise in Python book sales.

Reference :
>> Ruby Book Sales Pass Perl

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