Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly has posted four articles analysing the state of the computer book market in more detail than most of us care about.  The overall picture is not too good – sales are down – and there are some interesting trends.

Here is a good one for anyone who thinks Java is dying. The programming languages post shows that unit sales of books on Java increased by 17.2% in 2010 vs 2009, whereas the next most popular language, C#, declined by 1.7%. Objective C, in third place, also declined slightly. JavaScript unit sales were up by 14.5%.

Why is Java booming? There is a clue in one of the two bestselling Java titles mentioned by Hendrickson: Professional Android 2 Application Development

Another trend that caught my eye is in the first post. Some of the Down categories surprised me:

Adobe Flash –84.43%

Mac OS –32.12%

Web Design Tools –53.2%

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has sold well as far as I’m aware so although books on Flash and Dreamweaver have not been selling well, it is dangerous to draw obvious conclusions.

The influence of Android is unmistakeable though. Something for Oracle to consider as it pursues Google for breach of intellectual property.