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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (11689)	11/14/1998 11:45:00 PM
From: JC Jaros	Respond to of 64865

Is there a Perl scripter in the house? Last week, I discovered the "sales ranking" on each book title page at Amazon.com. It occurred to me that if this information is accurate, we could use Perl and Lynx to poll Amazon at specific intervals for relative rankings of the top tech books under certain topics (ie, Solaris, NT, Unix, Linux, Java, Perl, Win32Perl, Visual Basic) and get a pretty good bead on the real time mindshare trend in the enterprise, specifically Solaris/SysVr4 Unix. I've sampled Amazon several times and obtained different results day to day. I'm not quite sure how their rankings work, but typically, discounting actual 'Certification' texts (of which there are no Unix/Solaris counterparts to NT at Amazon), the top ranked Solaris book, "Solaris System Administrators Guide" (MacMillan) is ranked in a similar range to the top NT subject title, "Mastering Windows NT Server 4.0" (top 2,000). "Unix In A Nutshell" (a SysV book) typically ranks in the top 1,000 to 1,500 and I have seen it in the top 400. "Programming Perl" (Camel book) is typically in the top 300, and once it was in the top 100. "Learning Perl" is typically in the top 400, while "Learning Perl on Win32" only ranks in the top 4,000. The top Java book "Core Java fundamentals..." from Sun ranks consistently HIGHER than the Perl 'Camel' book, typically in the top 200. "Core Java..." is the best selling tech book under all subjects searched. The top Visual Basic book ranks typically only in the top 3,000. Lastly, the top Linux book, "Running Linux" is only somewhat ahead of the top Solaris book (1700) in sales ranking, but notably also above the top Windows NT book. It would be nice to be able to start charting the sales trends of a certain technical books with a thesis that those sales trends translate directly into mindshare, which should as well ultimately translate into earnings. Got Perl? (or other input) post public, or email:jjaros@svn.net JCJ BTW... if anyone installing Solaris 7 doesn't know about the terrific Solaris documentation online at Sun, it's docs.sun.com