Computer Book Trends

By Deane Barker • July 17, 2006 •

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla . This is the first time I’ve seen books on those systems in my local store. I tried Mambo once, but didn’t care for it. However, I have friends who swear by it….

The author noticed a trend in computer book trends at Barnes and Noble, noting the presence of books on systems like Mambo, Joomla, and WordPress. They also noted the unexpected presence of Packt, a company previously only available via mail order, on the shelves. The author suggests that the amount of shelf space a platform receives at Barnes and Noble can indicate its adoption, citing the rise of Python and Ruby as examples.

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I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things.

There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I’ve seen books on those systems in my local store. I tried Mambo once, but didn’t care for it. However, I have friends who swear by it.
I found the first book I’ve ever seen on WordPress – a Visual Quickstart Guide, no less (a good series of books, by the way). According to Amazon, this is one of only two books dedicated to WordPress. We’ve done a bit of WordPress development lately, and had good luck with it.
Our friends at Packt have suddenly hit the shelves. I thought they were strictly mail order. Good for them. (And why does Packt rule, you ask? Here’s why).

I’ve always thought you could gauge platform adoption by how much shelf space it’s getting at Barnes and Noble. This is how I knew Python wasn’t just a flash in the pan, and – more recently – it correctly predicted the rise of Ruby (I found about seven different books on Ruby tonight).

If this idea interests you, O’Reilly recently did an extremely in-depth series of postings about their view of the computer book market. Not surprisingly, they have all sorts of facts and figures to back it up.