Lambda the Ultimate

Books on two of the languages that get a lot of airplay on LtU have made the finalist list for this year's Jolt awards.

Books Technical
* High Performance MySQL by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, Derek J. Balling (O'Reilly Media)
* Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart (O'Reilly Media)
* Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners (Artima Press)
* Real World Haskell by John Goerzen, Bryan O'Sullivan, Donald Bruce Stewart (O'Reilly Media)
* The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK by Erica Sadun (Addison-Wesley Professional)

Congratulations to Martin, Lex, Bill, John, Bryan, and Don!

Whether or not either book wins, it's quite a sea change that two sophisticated, statically typed functional programming languages with research origins are getting so much mainstream attention.

From the FAQ

How are the winners selected?

Our judges not only examine the standard criteria of audience suitability, productivity, innovation, quality, ROI, risk and flexibility, but also seek to honor products that are ahead of the curve. Jolt-winning products are universally useful; are simple, yet rich in functionality; redefine their product space; and/or solve a nagging problem that has consistently eluded other products and books.