use Perl

Amazon.com lets people access their "Properties" via SOAP, and several publishers now like to mine that data for all sorts of reasons. Amazon.com could have a small market information business if they wanted it---maybe they do, but people seem to be doing it themselves.

This puts me in a new situation when I do this sort of work. Each person (or organization) that wants to access Amazon.com (which they call Properties) needs to have their own access token. I have an access token, and I can access data but I cannot redistribute it. That seems fair enough. If the person I work for has their own token, and they contract me to do some work for them, I can use their token and give them the data they asked me to get for them. They cannot redistribute it either. Nothing changes in the technology, and only a little bit changes in what actually happens, but it is completely different legally.

As I was collecting sales ranks the other day, I wondered how various Perl books were doing. I grabbed all of the data for those books, processed it, and output a nice chart. Then I realized I probably should not post it to my journal (since that would be redistribution of their data), at least not without Amazon's approval. I would like to add this sort of data to Perl at a Glance so we can see how Perl is doing compared to other technologies.

Instead of posting the data, here are some interesting conclusions.

• Programming Perl (2nd Edition) ranks higher than Programming Perl (3rd Edition)
• Learning Perl sells, but Learning Perl on Win32 does not, according to the sales rank
• PHP books rank high, as do books with "Cookbook" in the title.
• Python books have middling sales ranks

What does this mean? Write Learning Perl PHP Cookbook if you want to have a high sales rank, but leave off the Win32 bits.