January 17th, 2007
O'Reilly showing big uptick in Flex and ActionScript books
Thanks to Alex Barnett I saw that Tim O'Reilly has posted screenshots of their sales data with some very cool visualizations about what's hot and what's growing the fastest. Now as you would expect, Javascript books grew at a pretty steady pace. But what should be of no surprise to anyone that reads my blog is that Flash and Flex are also doing very well.
Actionscript books saw a 22% increase in sales and increased their market share in the programming languages category. Web design and development was interesting because "Flash" stayed pretty stagnant at 2% growth (though it's share of total sales was impressive). Flex on the other hand, grew at an amazing 42% and looks like it's becoming a bigger chunk of the web design and development market. Keep in mind that most of the Flex books aren't even out yet.
Another thing that struck me was the plummeting of traditionally desktop programming languages: Visual Basic, C/C++, ect. Java even took a plunge which when looking at the bigger picture is a good indication that interest continues to move into the web. And the fact that RIA books have grown by so much means there is a lot of interest in building richer web experiences. I'm looking forward to seeing these maps next year when more RIA technologies have been released and written about.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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