Books in the store in the USA - still a portent of the UK market to come?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-05-08 23:37:57 - Graham EllisIn the quite-distant past, I've written about how we look at bookshops while we're in the USA, see which technical books they have on their shelves, and use it as one input - one guiding light - in reading where the UK may be headed in six months to a year. [article]. With technical books now being very much an online purchase, the pointers may not be so good ... but I took the opportunity to go into Borders in Pentagon City, have a browse in the old fashioned way, and see what they had on the programming languages we teach:
PHP (lots)
Java (lots)
C++ (lots)
Python (lots)
Ruby (lots)
Perl (2)
Tcl (1)
Lua (none that I saw)
MySQL and Linux are very popular. I was on the lookout for Scala (3 books), SQLite (none) and Go (none). Didn't spot any of the Tomcat books (but then I wasn't particularly looking). Others of note - Ajax, Restful, lot of iphone app development books.
My guess is they stock what they sell, and my guess is that in an office and US government area they sell to the various office workers and government departments. Perhaps I can even conclude which languages people are learning for their work.
It's a bit of a shock just how low Perl is - but (I'm afraid) only a bit of a shock. It's faded somewhat, and to some extent the lack of books indicates a lack of newcomers to the languages, rather than any lack of use by the older hands. Book stocks and sales will give no pointers to that.
I bought ... a handful of books. Just two of them on programming - one Python, and one iPhone. And books on data, general programming and implementation of social networks, and search engine optimization. Two particular books I was looking for were nowhere to be seen; me thinks that's an excuse to pop up to London some Saturday and go round Foyles ;-)