Fieldbus Book Wars
One way of judging programming language popularity is to compare book sales. So I decided to do something similar – see how many books in Amazon.com had the names of popular fieldbuses in their title. I excluded non-English books (German Profibus users get more choices) and standards documents.
| Fieldbus | In Print | Out Of Print | Total |
| CANOpen | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Profibus | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Profinet | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Foundation Fieldbus | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Devicenet | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Ethernet/IP | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| EtherCAT | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Ethernet PowerLink | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Modbus | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Modbus/TCP | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| CC-Link | 0 | 0 | 0 |
I wouldn’t choose a fieldbus on the basis of books; for example, many of the fieldbuses have good information available on the web. But it’s interesting to look at the book titles and year of publication:
- Embedded Networking with CAN and CANOpen (2003, out of print). The authors are trying to arrange another printing.
- CANopen Implementation: Applications to Industrial Networks (2000, unavailable)
- Profibus: A Pocket Guide (2003, in print)
- Decentralization with Profibus DP/DPV1 (2004, in print)
- Profibus: The Fieldbus for Industrial Automation (1993, unavailable)
- Automating with Profinet: Industrial communication based on Industrial Ethernet (2006, in print)
- Design and Installation of Foundation Fieldbus Systems (2007, unavailable)
- Foundation Fieldbus (2005, in print)
- Foundation Fieldbus: A Pocket Guide (2002, unavailable)
Apparently fieldbus books do sell: several recent books are already out of print (or otherwise unavailable).
Tony
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2 comments
I guess not all the books are on Amazon. Through the http://www.us.profibus.com website (under Resources/Books) we offer The New Rapid Way to PROFIBUS DP and The Rapid Way to PROFINET. (These are also available in languages other than English.) There is also a book in English (and German, Japanese, and Chinese) on PROFIBUS PA available from the publisher: Oldenbourg.
[...] Software Blog, Tony posted a comparison of the number of fieldbus books available on Amazon: “Fieldbus Book Wars”. Of course, not all fieldbus books are available from Amazon, so I felt compelled to [...]
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