Under Microsoft's tree

With the holidays here, I was curious what Microsoft employees might be buying as gifts, so I checked out the Amazon.com "purchase circle" list of top 10 books purchased by Microsoft employees through the Amazon site. Coming in at No. 1., just what you always wanted under the tree: "Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime."

Don't worry, that's not what Microsoft employees are buying for their kids. That book is actually atop the list of titles "uniquely popular" at Microsoft, "as compared with the rest of the country," as Amazon describes it. Leading an alternate list, based purely on sales to Microsoft employees, is "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

The bestselling "Harry Potter" is also atop the comparable lists of Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer. But as with the .NET title at Microsoft, the "uniquely popular" lists of those companies provide some insights into the employee mindset. No. 1 on the list for Apple is "Mac OS X in a Nutshell," as you might expect. Sun's preference, meanwhile, suggests Scott McNealy might want to keep a closer eye on some of his employees. No. 1 there is "Dillon’s Dilemma." As the publisher describes it, the book is "a high-tech story of hackers, international corporate espionage and artificial intelligence."