- Mar 2026: 124
- Feb 2026: 140
- Jan 2026: 157
- Dec 2025: 306
- Nov 2025: 484
- Oct 2025: 218
- Sep 2025: 176
- Aug 2025: 136
- Jul 2025: 317
- Jun 2025: 230
- May 2025: 237
- Apr 2025: 165
- Mar 2025: 367
Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past.
Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has sold roughly 20,000 copies (about 10,500 English paperback copies, 3,800 ebooks, and 6,700 translated copies). The 2nd edition came out in 2024 and has sold roughly 13,000 copies (about 8,300 English paperback copies, about 3,000 ebooks, and about 1,600 translated copies).
Most of the money comes from O'Reilly's online platform, not from book sales. That has been declining lately, partially because the latest edition is now over 2 years old, but also I suspect that people are cancelling O'Reilly subscriptions and just relying on LLMs (which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so).
I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends.
I hear you and agree on the unlicensed training point - it is a form piracy.
The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones.
The current generation turning 18-21 don't.
It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else.
It's that peripheral knowledge that is being lost when people use LLMs, and quick start guides.
Historically you'd have a team where skill, knowledge and experience was very variable but each person often brought another piece of the puzzle to a team.
Increasingly people have narrow knowledge "bases".
Does it matter? Perhaps not but it definitely has taken some of the joy of discussing problems and solutions out of my working life.
It was like this in the days when the primary shortcut was StackOverflow as well. People who are allergic to RTFM treat things that are covered in the docs as "esoteric" knowledge because they never read anything except as a shortcut to solving their immediate problem.
I think the stats are clear that reading is in decline in general, though. I'm sure LLMs will add to this much like YouTube has.
Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a dev to confidently handle concurrency in Go. Still, it's a beautiful language and if I ever come back I hope I can still find books about it, as I hate using AI for learning.
The argument about the ability to self host doesn't really make sense to me given that most of society can not even afford RAM at the moment. So all these big tech frontier models should be public domain.
Honestly I didn't expect LLMs to progress so fast. Now it just seems like an unnecessary solution to a problem that no longer exists.
I didn't have a problem with it when it was Aaron Swartz, not sure why I should have a problem with it when others do it.
But he was working with scientific papers— the outputs of public institutions— and his likely goal was releasing them to the public. What proprietary AI companies have done in training LLMs on every book in existence is nothing like that.
I used to write books in the past (all obsolete since, well, two decades+ now) and I'm totally fine with piracy: people who are pirating content are typically not those who are going to pay for it anyway.
As a sidenote I'd really wish that state resources spent fighting bad actors in society was first uses to catch and imprison rapists and the likes and not chasing pirates sailing the digital high-seas but I digress...
Priorities.
> Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all...
That is far from true - opinion is quite divided, perhaps even close to 50/50. It sometimes seems that the opinion is skewed massively towards the positive because there are a lot more “look what I did with GenAI” stories because “yeah, I'm not doing that because… here's what I did the old way” doesn't catch interest in the same manner.
This is one of the (several) reasons I'm doing my level best to avoid using the tools - I don't want to pay in to the companies that have run ripshod over everyone's work because they can¹. This is a rather risky position to take in a company where the up-aboves have all but said “get with AI or get left behind”, but quite frankly at the moment “redundancy” isn't a scary word for me².
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[1] Take from a few (i.e. download a couple of TV shows) and it is piracy making you liable for huge fines or even prison time, take from practically everyone (hoover up all their published writing irrespective of licence, gum up their servers with your badly written, or well written but deliberately badly behaved, scraper, etc…) and that is perfectly valid for training purposes.
[2] I appreciate that for many this is not the case, and because of economic pressures they might have to compromise on their feelings if they have the same opinions as I do on GenAI.
That might be true if you look further into it. I am a casual frontpage reader and the frontpage usually is plastered with AI stuff. Either new bullshit benchmarks, AI workflows, AI editor updates, AI company did something bad (again), or cool(?) projects people vibecoded. I also had arguments about AI used for art on here before and my personal experience usually is people defending their slop art.
Companies are shrinking body counts, so you have less buyers of programming books.
For whatever reason, I forgot that Go uses a gopher as its mascot. But like, their PHP books don't use an elephant.
I dunno, I was just curious if the author could pick an animal to be on the cover, or if it wasn't their choice.
Your book is highly recommended in the Go community.
I will definitely be reading it once I finish "The Go programming language".
If you publish a 3rd edition and I’m not replaced by AI by then, I’ll buy it. :)
On other topics, using AI can fill some gaps, but books summarizing years of hard-won knowledge are priceless. NoStarch is amazing when it comes to such resources. They have an upcoming book on Linux kernel Memory Management for example, the classic Linux tome from Kerrisk and very specialized security books.
On the other hand I cancelled my O’Reilly sub because I didn’t read enough to make it worth the price and now I purchase DRM-free e-books individually, as needed.
As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.
