10 Notable O’Reilly Books in 2007

Author: Jimmy

9 Jan

Tim O’Reilly opines on notable tech books from 2007 — just have a quick look on his list.

Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual: this book sold out of its 50,000 copy first printing in a few of days. In the fourth quarter of 2007, the total size of the market for books on Mac operating systems was about 60% the size of the market for books on Windows. Mac is hyped again!

iPhone: The Missing Manual. This is the first time a book on a phone has been a top computer book bestseller. This indicates end the personal computer era.

Essential ActionScript 3.0and Programming Flex 2. Ajax books have slowed down considerably, while books on Adobe’s web technologies are really moving. Flash is still on a roll.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide continues to be one of all time bestsellers. While a host of languages battle it out on the server side, Javascript (and its cousin Actionscript) dominate client side programming.

RESTful Web Services … provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it. It won over SOAP, UDDI and all the rest of the corporate web services (books?).

Beautiful Code, a collection of essays by master programmers about how they solved particularly hard problems, must have hit a nerve. It was #9 bestselling title for the year.

Programming Collective Intelligence was one of sleeper titles for the year. Brick and mortar stores still don’t know what to do with it because, like many breakthrough titles, it is the start of a new category rather than one more entry into an existing one.

Programming WCF Services was on list of top performing books for the year, surprised? You might never have heard of Windows Communications Foundation, Microsoft’s approach to building SOA applications on Windows but don’t count Microsoft out of the Web services game yet!

Devices of the Soul wasn’t one of bestsellers last year, but it was one of most important and thought-provoking books. It was also one of Amazon’s top picks for the year.

Learning Python was the top programming language book in last week’s bookscan report.