Tim O'Reilly is reporting that the sales of Ruby books have surpassed those of Perl books for the first time coming into Q3 2006 in numbers researched by Roger Magoulas, the director of O'Reilly Research. The data comes from Nielsen Bookscan's point of sales reports of the top 3000 computer books.
In a graph charting the market share of books for various 'fast development' languages (PHP, JavaScript, Perl, ActionScript, Python, and Ruby) between Q1 2003 and Q3 2006, O'Reilly demonstrates Ruby's rapid growth in the book market. With the line for Ruby not even leaving the X-axis until Q3 2004, it has shot above ActionScript, Python, and Perl quickly, with all of those languages experiencing a decline, as opposed to Ruby's growth. Since Q1 2006, only JavaScript and Ruby have grown in share, with JavaScript's growth roughly matching that of Ruby.