So what’s on O’Reilly’s radar at the moment? Apparently Ruby is the current star. Obviously due to Rails, Ruby book sales are up 1552% vs the same period last year. I think the great thing about Rails is that it is showing everyone, myself included, how intuitive and sophisticated Ruby actually is.

By conventions, Rails development is very elegant. There’s a bit of obsessive compulsiveness in programming in Ruby. You find yourself trying to be as efficient as you can, because Ruby affords you many ways to actually achieve that. I, like most everyone else, knew about Ruby as “the other scripting language”, but after the last few months I’ve really gained a lot of respect for the massively object oriented programming language.

So what’s hot and what’s not? Java is cooling and C# is getting warmer. Python is gaining momentum and Perl is cold. While Perl is still the most used scripting language in terms of book sales, its year over year sales are negative while everything else is positive. Java is still the overall king of programming languages with almost 3 times the book sales of everything else. My guess is that its due to the fact that there is probably 50 Java books out there by O’Reilly, but Java is so robust, there really CAN be that many topics, with more coming.

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