Safari vs. Codefetch on Amazon's Best Sellers

Can you rely on O'reilly's paid Safari service for the latest code from programming books? Apparently not. I knew Safari was lacking independent publishers like Pragmatic Programmers, but when I did this experiment I was surprised they don't even offer their own bestsellers. Strange. Anti-cannibalism perhaps?

We took Amazon's computer bestseller list for February 21, 2006, eliminated non-programming books, and looked at whether the books are code-searchable on Safari or Codefetch:

Book	Code on Safari?	Code on Codefetch?
DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model	no	yes
Head First Design Patterns	no	yes
Ajax in Action	no	yes
Professional ASP.NET 2.0	no	no
Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide	no	yes
SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide	no	no
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition	no	yes
Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML	no	no
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software	no	yes
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions	no	yes

More C Code

The publicity from Wired and Slashdot has yielded more searches for C and C++ topics than ever before and I noticed there were not enough results. A little research showed that we were missing some good C books because the publishers didn't categorize them as C books. After a little digging we added much more C code last night and more C++ too. We'll add two new Ajax books on March 1 when they are officially published.

Codefetch on Slashdot and Wired News

Codefetch got a little boost of activity from being mentioned on Slashdot and Wired News on Friday.

Wired issued this article about not-yet-operational search code search engine startup krugle, and mentioned codefetch and koders as competitors.

Slashdot picked up the story with this posting whose comments discuss codefetch. On slashdot there was initially some confusion that maybe Google had launched Krugle.