Well, it's over. Grails beats Rails: As Michael Yuan points out, three Groovy and Grails books were in the top ten sellers at JavaOne. No Ruby or Rails books made the cut.

Read that again. Groovy and Grails are kicking some serious Ruby Rails ass. I like both stacks, but frankly the JavaOne numbers do not match my impression of what people are up to. Let's double check that against the Amazon rankings:

Programming Ruby is currently #1,731 on Amazon, and did not make the top 15 at JavaOne.

Agile Web Development with Rails is currently #531 on Amazon, and did not make the top 15 at JavaOne.

The Definitive Guide to Grails is currently #24,375 on Amazon, and was #4 at JavaOne at the time of Michael's post.

Hmmm. So maybe Grails does a lot better only at a Java-specific events. Not too surprising. But actually, we don't even know that. As it turns out, the Pragmatic Press books were not for sale at JavaOne. After my talk, attendees followed me to the bookstore asking what to buy, and I told them to wait until they got home.

I guess winning the battle of statistics is about choosing the battleground.

[Editor's note: Stuart Halloway, the author of this post, is the best selling Java book author ever, among Duke graduates with the initials SDH. Take that, David Geary!]