Tim O'Reilly has an intersting view of the computer book market from several different points of view: O'Reilly Radar > State of the Computer Book Market, Q306, Part 2

An interesting bit for me looking at computer languages:

• Ruby has continued to grow apace, although its 255% growth rate is off last quarter's torrid 687% increase! Interestingly, PHP also picked up some steam, up 11% vs. last quarter's 6% YoY increase. Python's 27% YoY gain, up from last quarter's 6% gain, shows even more strength. [...]
• The decline of Java book sales has accelerated, while C# books have continued their steady increase. When you aggregate books on both C# ".Net Languages" (books that cover both C# and VB.Net), the C# book market is now about 12% larger than Java. [...]
• Javascript book sales are up 152% -- actually less than we expected given the new release of JavaScript this fall. If you aggregate sales of ActionScript books with JavaScript (and ActionScript is, after all, a dialect of JavaScript), it is now the 2nd largest language (after Java), in terms of book sales. (It's third if you aggregate the ".Net languages" category entirely to VB rather than to C#. See the note above about Java vs. C#.)

Tim doesn't mention it, but C/C++ is down 23%. As someone who prefers to program close to the machine, the explosion in high-level language use is pretty disturbing. No doubt those languages are allowing great productivity in quick, easy deployments, but in order to do your best job and get the best most elegant most performant code, you need to have a foundation in C/C++.

Of course, if I sold servers and memory, I wouldn't say a peep.