o(ther)l/log

O'Reilly Labs collected statistics from 672 of their books, and put everything accessible online. Lot of interesting ways of exploring the data: from book structure to example distribution.

My own experiment: search for the most popular tags in a given year (no direct link because the results are displayed with an ajaxy trick):

1997

files, variables, functions and arrays

1998

files methods, text, ... web site, html also present but farther away

1999

URLs is the big thing, with databases, files, backups. Linux and security

2000

URLs, methods files security and objects

2001

files, classes and methods, objects security servers

2002

methods, classes functions and commands

2003

classes methods, objects files and configuration

2004

functions, methods, Oracle. XML, web sites, SQL Server

2005

methods, commands, functions, classes, web sites and security

Totally non-scientific, but it is quite funny to see URLs mostly visible in 1999 and 2000. Also interesting that OOP-related tags where a bit hidden in the noise first, but then clearly in front and stable at this position.