As a user group leader, I get frequent visits from UPS, Airborne, DHL and FedEx dropping off .NET books from various publishers to raffle off at the Vermont.NET monthly meetings. In the past few weeks, there's been an interesting pattern.

A slew of VB books from APress
Beginning VB 2008 Databases
Visual Basic 2008 Recipes
Pro VB 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform
Pro WPF with VB2008
Beginning VB2008
Accelerated VB 2008

From WROX
Beginning ASP.NET in C# and VB
Pro ASP.NET in C# and VB
As well as other VB 2008 titles from WROX that just don't happen to be in my house.

And SAMS
SAMS Teach Yourself VB 2008 in 24 hours (there's a C# version of this too). I've always wondered about those 24 hour books. Have you ever tried one? I can tell you that it probably took a lot more than 24 hours to write it!

My own book that I'm in the process of writing (Programming Entity Framework - O'Reilly) will be VB and C# as well.

So this is interesting to me because a few years ago authors were saying that they were going to cut back on VB books because the sales were low. In fact, in this blog post, Bill McCarthy has a chart provided by OReilly that shows the decline of VB book up until 2005-2006.

But this is a pretty nice selection of books so far - both beginner and pro level - for VB developers.

So what's going on? Has something changed since mid 2006? Actually, no. According to this snip from OReilly's huge graphical image comparing Q4 2006 book sales to Q4 2007 book sales (from Mike Hendrikson's blog post), VB's bright red color indicates that sales were down in that time period. And the fact that VB's red is really bright means that the sales were down a lot. The size of the block represents the percentage of that segment (programming) of the market.

When Visual Studio 2005 was built, there were features added in specifically to make it easier for VB6 developers make the transition to VB.NET. One would think that this might increase usage of VB.NET and therefore book sales.

And of course more time has passed so more of the VB6 holdouts are transitioning. I would guess that it's the larger companies that have been holding out more than Joe Independent Developer since it's a huge investment for them, but one that they eventually need to make. Maybe they buy one book and share it?

What about new .NET developers? Are they starting with VB or C#? As per this post from Paul Vick, the stats from the downloads of the Express editions (VB, C#, C++, etc) show that "Visual Basic is the #1 downloaded and #1 registered Express Edition (topping the #2 position by 20%)"

Whatever the reason, the publishers (except for OReilly who must have read their graph as they have only one VB2008 title so far ) seem optimistic enough to print a bunch of VB titles or books that "swing both ways" like the above mentioned WROX titles or my own. I'm happy to see these books and know they will be very well received at the next VTdotNET meeting (except for the Recipe book which I'm keeping for myself for the time being with a book mark on the recipe for "Test an Object's Type" because I always forget how to do that)!