Addison Wesley top the book lists
January 1st, 2006 by HenA while ago I bought new bookshelves for my computer book collection. Being the type of person I am, I looked at the large pile of books and immediately began to categorize, going back and forth until it felt right [ie: fit the shelves]. Thus I ended up with:
- 3 shelves of Java books
- A shelf of scripting books
- A shelf of Linux + Internet service books
- Half a shelf of database books, half a shelf of ‘other’ OS books
- An ‘others’ shelf, mostly filled with math books.
- And finally, a shelf of classic books.
I was quite surprised to later look at the shelf of classic books and see just how many Addison Wesley books were there, 11 AW, with 3 Prentice Hall [also owned by parent company Pearson]. Not bad for a shelf of 26 books, which by comparison contained just 3 O’Reilly’s (largely because O’Reilly book tended to fit the other categories).
So my surprise at seeing the domination of AW books at Bookpool’s Top Ten book list was prety brief. Eight of the top ten are from AW, with the other two being Microsoft Press. Three more of the next four are from AW, with O’Reilly’s camel book the odd one out.
This isn’t really suggesting that an AW book is likely to be better or worse than another; but it does seem to hint that there’s a very good chance that your favourite computing book was published by Addison Wesley.