Below is the latest update to The Popularity of Data Analysis Software.
Books
The number of books published on each software package or language reflects its relative popularity. Amazon.com offers an advanced search method which works well for all the software except R and the general-purpose languages such as Java, C, and MATLAB. I did not find a way to easily search for books on analytics that used such general purpose languages, so I’ve excluded them in this section.
The Amazon.com advanced search configuration that I used was (using SAS as an example):
Title: SAS -excerpt -chapter -changes -articles
Subject: Computers & Technology
Condition: New
Format: All formats
Publication Date: After January, 2000
The “title” parameter allowed me to focus the search on books that included the software names in their titles. Other books may use a particular software in their examples, but they’re impossible to search for easily. SAS has many manuals for sale as individual chapters or excerpts. They contain “chapter” or “excerpt” in their title so I excluded them using the minus sign, e.g. “-excerpt”. SAS also has short “changes and enhancements” booklets that the developers of other packages release only in the form of flyers and/or web pages, so I excluded “changes” as well. Some software listed brief “articles” which I also excluded. I did the search on June 1, 2015, and I excluded excerpts, chapters, changes, and articles from all searches.
“R” is a difficult term to search for since it’s used in book titles to indicate Registered Trademark as in “SAS(R)”. Therefore I verified all the R books manually.
The results are shown in Table 1, where it’s clear that a very small number of analytics software packages dominate the world of book publishing. SAS has a huge lead with 576 titles, followed by SPSS with 339 and R with 240. SAS and SPSS both have many versions of the same book or manual still for sale, so their numbers are both inflated as a result. JMP and Hadoop both had fewer than half of R’s count and then Minitab and Enterprise Miner had fewer then half again as many. Although I obtained counts on all 27 of the domain-specific (i.e. not general-purpose) analytics software packages or languages shown in Figure 2a, I cut the table off at software that had 8 or fewer books to save space.
Software Number of Books
SAS 576
SPSS Statistics 339
R 240 [Corrected from: 172]
JMP 97
Hadoop 89
Stata 62
Minitab 33
Enterprise Miner 32
Table 1. The number of books whose titles contain the name of each software package.
[Correction: Thanks to encouragement from Bernhard Lehnert (see comments below) the count for R has been corrected from 172 to the more accurate 240.]