O'Reilly Says Ruby Surpasses Perl in Book Sales

CGIDir
Tuesday, August 1, 2006; 03:25 AM

O'Reilly Media's trend-spotting outfit O'Reilly Radar announced that Ruby's popularity is growing, as evidenced by sales of the company's popular brand of IT training books. Furthermore, the relatively new programming language has just passed an important milestone by beating the book sale numbers of Perl.  Do not throw away your Perl programming skills, though: the market for Perl programmers is still several times larger than Ruby's.

Both scripting languages have strong web development bias.  While Perl is usually used for scripting in Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Ruby programming for the internet is done in conjunction with the Rails open source web application framework.   Ruby on Rails was extracted a project-management tool by Web 2.0 company 37signals. It was first released to the public in July 2004.

Ruby surpasses Perl book sales for the first time. In the job market Ruby shows increase in job postings, but is still considerably smaller than the job market for Perl or Python. Top programming skills, according to the same research, are Java, followed by .NET and JavaScript.