Michael Yuan

JavaOne has a long tradition of tabulating and ranking book sales from the conference official book store. All technical book publishers are present in the bookstore and they make their most popular Java book titles available at a discount to the 15,000+ JavaOne attendee. The attendees’ interest in technical books is often a gauge of the technology trend in the Java world.

Well, on the first day of the conference, my new book “JBoss Seam” made the top 10 best seller list! That says a lot about Seam’s momentum among developers. Furthermore, I have several interesting observations of titles on the list:

1. JavaServer Faces (JSF) is really taking off! Despite what the “cool kids” say in the blogsphere, JSF is very much in demand in the real world! The number one book on the list is a JSF book and my book is closely related to JSF. Actually, according to Matt Raible’s 2007 web framework comparison report: JSF leads other post-Struts web frameworks by a big margin in terms of number of jobs available.

2. In terms of dynamic scripting languages, people are much more interested in Groovy / Grails than Ruby / JRuby / Rails — that is despite 2 days of intensive JRuby / Rails brain-wash from Sun. The best selling Rails book is at #15 while 3 Groovy / Grails books made into top 10. I guess Java developers do want a scripting language that is closely related to Java!

3. Netbeans marketing surely is effective!

Here is the actual list:

JavaOne book store will update the best seller list on a daily basis. So, let’s stay tuned to see what happens tomorrow!

Update: By the end of the conference, the book remained at #6 on the best seller list although other top books get shuffled around. I finally got a JavaOne best seller under my belt! Here is the final tally:

Last night, we had two Seam-related BoFs in JavaOne. Kito Mann and myself presented “Extend and Improve JSF with Seam” at 9pm, and then Petr Pisl and I presented “Rapid Seam App Development with NetBeans” at 10pm. Despite the late timing, the first BoF attracted around 150 to 200 people, and the latter one attracted around 80 people. That was more people than some afternoon technical sessions! I have presented on JavaOne BoFs for years and those were the best turn-outs I have seen. Seam is the way to go!

We will post more materials — slides, demos, and update software — from the sessions very soon (after I recover from all the partying in San Francisco! ;)). Stay tuned!

My new JBoss Seam book came out just in time for the JavaOne conference. The publisher (Prentice Hall) brought 5 copies of the book for display in their booth as well as in the Red Hat booth. Well, before the day’s end, we only have 2 copies left! The display copies are simply disappearing from the booth as people walked by!

It is hard to imagine that people paying $5000+ to attend JavaOne would “steal” a $40 book on the show. They probably think that the display copies are vendor freebies? But then, this does not seem to happen to other books and certainly never happened in the vendor booths I had worked in the past 3 JavaOne conferences (we have books on display every year)!

Anyway, we will be running out of display copies very soon at this rate. But here is a tip: there are plenty copies in the JavaOne official book store — along side with my Java ME best seller “Enterprise J2ME”. So, bring it on! Go steal that book!

PS. That just remind me an episode a year ago when my “Nokia Smartphone Hacks” book made the “daily most downloaded book” on popular BitTorrent site Mininova. Well, I am flattered and offended at the same time!