No this time I’m not referring to the political scene in Italy, but to a practical problem.
I’ll be working on a webapplication that has to be written in Ruby on Rails. I’m not exactly a Ruby expert but I know how to use it, I should be able to do what I’m asked to, so it’s not a big deal, but as I’m not that used to complex webapplications, I was thinking of buying one of the books that are being written on the topic. I was mainly thinking of Rails Recipes, but as that’s not yet printed, I was tempted by Agile Web Development with Rails, too. I’m not a person who likes to spend money for redundant stuff, but if there’s something I like to buy is books, so I always thought that money spent on books is always money well spent.
I looked how much would they be, and it was a quite acceptable price, €33 for the PDF and the printed copy of Rails Recipes and €29 for Agile Web Development. Not a bad price after all. Unfortunately, the shipping price is really high: €21 for two books, two times the shipping for a single book. For sure, I don’t have so much money to spend to buy both, and buying only one of them, with €10 of shipping is not something I much like.
I’ll end up waiting for the two books to be available on Italy e-shops.
Sometimes, I’d like to live on the other side of Atlantic just to have decent shipping prices, sigh 🙁