25 May 2006

According to Bookscan (a service which tracks book sales for all sorts of books), Expert C# 2005 Business Objects is number 365 and Expert VB 2005 Business Objects is number 385 among all computer books out there. This includes consumer-oriented computer books too, so these numbers are incredibly good. Programming books have a hard time competing with consumer books for sales volume after all.

What I find most interesting is that the VB sales are comparable to the C# sales. Obviously there really is a market for higher end VB programming books, which I think validates a view I’ve held for a long time, that the VB community was waiting for .NET to mature before moving forward. Clearly VS 2005 is triggering a non-trivial movement of VB developers into .NET, and these are hard-core professional developers who are looking for something beyond the reference-style and tutorial style books out there.

Like I said a few months ago, in .NET 1.1 the C# book outsold the VB book rather substantially. These numbers appear to show that the dynamic is changing, and I find that quite exciting!