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:
hi michael,
Thanks for the list from those of us who couldn’t make it there.
about netbeans : but there is only 1 netbeans book out there!
JBoss Seam : yeah, it’s about time more people got around to using Seam. You guys should make Spring and Guice users adopt Seam users by playing nice and coming up with tutorials!
big surprise : Java Data Mining.
Booch’s OOAD book : after reading robert martin’s book, I thought that this book would never happen but good to know that there is a new edition. Would love to see reviews of this book.
BR,
~A
Hi Anjan,
The “Rich Client Programming” book is also focused on NetBeans.
Notice that there is no Eclipse book on the list despite the overall higher popularity of Eclipse among Java developers.
Re: Seam and Juice: Seam already supports Spring! And Juice support will come soon — actually Gavin and Bob Lee did a presentation togeter at J1
cheers
Michael
Congratulations - its a good book, too, and deserves its recognition. Too minor comments though - first, something about this entry seems to have messed up the flow on the first page of your blog. Second - and this is more about the book - what I’d dearly love to see as a follow-up would be a true Enterprise book about Seam. Something that built on the first book, for example, but assumed that you’re building a clustered, translated, EJB3 application and went on from there. I think that there’s a lot of good use of Seam in the higher-end-than-Ruby world, but there’s currently a dearth of consise best-practicies around it as a framework.
You can get a lot from piecing together JSF/JBoss/Hibernate/etc practices and experience, but it would be wondeful to have a comprehensive guide, especially since Seam does take care of some (but not all) of the issues for you.
Richard,
You are absolutely right. We need more higher end content for Seam. But Seam is still a very new framework (for enterprise users at least). It takes time to perfect the best practices etc. But we are trying very hard at it now. It may not be another book — but as a series of white paper or something. In the meanwhile, if you have good ideas you’d like to share, we are all ears.
Re the blog layout: It looks fine in my Firefox. Which browser are you using? Thanks.
cheers
Michael
Hi Michael,
Congrats on your book, I look forward to reading it. I think you are missing some information on the JavaOne book stats that might cause you to revisit your conclusions on Groovy and Ruby: http://www.relevancellc.com/2007/5/16/javaone-book-sales-statistics-in-context
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