On 5/25/07, Eric Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We actually had this discussion about Tiobe and O'rielly. One of the main > reasons books sales are low is that CFWACK and the Advanced book are about > all we need. Ben, Ray, and the other authors did such a great job...we > don't really need O'Rielly's book (I actually thought their book was quite > useless...I bought the CFMX7 book and it is just collecting dust on my > shelf)
O'Reilly's data is sourced from *Bookscan* -- _all_ the books in print, not from their own sales. Tim's been doing this report for about 3 years to look at the overall book market and historically it's actually a fairly good indicator of what's up and coming (eg saw the Ruby bubble just before Rails hit mainstream). But it is what it is -- sales of books, no more and no less. Personally, I'd be terrified to hire a programmer who's sole instruction in CF and programming was the CFWACK book -- nothing against the book per se, but it's certainly not a book for developing a high-end programmer, nor does it seem intended to be. It's an intro to ColdFusion, but no more useful to producing a good programmer than HeadFirst PHP+MySQL or Java in 24 hours or any introductory book, and frankly there aren't any advanced and current books on CF outside of a few self-published ones. Having written a few books (including ColdFusion ones) I'd suggest that the reason you don't see the ColdFusion books is that there's not a market for them. Note that in the O'Reilly numbers, ActionScript is way up there (and rightly so between Flash, Flex, and Apollo). There's a market there. >I am not sure where Tiobe gets their info, http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/tpci_definition.htm explains it all. Not necessarily the best metric, but it's definable, reproducible, and clear > but I sure see a lot of > large corps using CF. And RPG. And COBOL. And SmallTalk (which tracks containers on most of the container ships in the world, among other things). And Ruby/Rails. And Java. And .NET. etc That really doesn't mean much. Using book sales to determine the popularity of a > language is about as useful as asking a shop that still uses as/400. I'd doubt that. Sales of books are requests for information -- whether that's a personal request (hey, I need to learn a new language), problem request (there's got to be a better way for me to do this flash stuff), or business request (train everybody on python) a sale is a sale. It's one measure of popularity. Bookscan is similar in most respects to Soundscan or whoever it is that tracks music sales. Personally, I think Avril Lavine's new album blows, but it's #3 and that says something about record sales, and potentially about music popularity. I can complain all I want about what a great band Trent Wagler and Steel Wheels is for example, but Avril Lavine still wins on record sales. I'm guessing lots of you have heard of Avril Lavine, but guessing most haven't heard of Trent -- doesn't make Trent bad, but it's a harder sell to book him at the Staples Center in LA than her. And I know who I'm gonna hear if I switch over to a Top20 radio station -- just like I know I'm going to see job postings for Java and .NET much more frequently than CF. > ColdFusion may neer be a giant thanks to lackluster marketing by Allaire, > Macromedia, and now Adobe,but it certainly is not in it's death throes. I > get calls almost every day for contracts dealing with ColdFusion and I get > paid quit well for them. I agree that CF is not in it's death throes -- but as I said, it's also not poised for huge growth. I do plenty of ColdFusion work, but I see more and more request for Rails and some specific PHP app/platforms like Drupal and Joomla!. And I'm getting more and more requests for CF->Rails conversions. *And* I'm not getting anywhere near the requests for Java web applications (Struts/Tapestry/etc) -- and this experience jibes with a lot of the small/mid shops that I work with/thru. There's still a solid market for COBOL programmers. And Smalltalk programmers. And ADA programmers. And so on. Ironically, as the pool of programmers for some of these languages go down, the pay correspondingly goes up (just as lots of good java programmers drove the price of good java programmers down). In a market economy skills are rewarded by the need for that skill, not always it's usefulness or external value. Chad Fowler's book "My Job Went to India and All I Got Was This Book" has some great discussions about improving your career by becoming an expert in the *trailing* edge -- picking software that is being passed over by new programmers but still in demand (eg COBOL) but realizing when it's time to broaden your market potential before the wave crashes into the beach. This is the converse of jumping on the leading edge and possibly getting crushed by making the wrong choice (eg Groovy) but possibly riding high (eg Rails). There's plenty of interesting stuff out there -- Lua, Erlang, D, Ragel, etc, etc and they all have a market. CF, while probably more popular than anything in that short list, is a niche. Nothing wrong with filling your niche well and plenty of people can make a living doing it. I've at times worked with things like Cache (a object-oriented database that's big in healthcare) and folks like Gemstone make a spectacular amount of money in their Smalltalk niche. And frankly the Smalltalk guys are just as likely to rapidly defend the glory of Smalltalk :) But it's a niche. Not dead -- a niche. -- John Paul Ashenfelter CTO/Transitionpoint (blog) http://www.ashenfelter.com (email) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| ColdFusion MX7 and Flex 2 Build sales & marketing dashboard RIAâs for your business. 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