Just a note to let Canadians (and possibly other non-US monks) know that I did some comparison shoping over the weekend (limited, of course, as I am lazy).

I compared the prices on Programming Perl (3rd ed.), Perl Cookbook, and Learning Perl (2nd ed.) on FatBrain.com (linked to from perlmonks.org) and Chapters.ca.

Dispite FatBrain.com being an American site and the Canadian dollar being fairly low ($0.6538US), I still manged to save $70CDN from Chapters.ca. This more than made up for a $20US ($30.59CDN)shipping fee.

I'd assume that shipping costs for monks overseas might alter this perspective, but I didn't check (like I said: lazy). But FatBrain.com had a nicely orginized chart for shipping costs.

I hope this information helps someone out there.



FouRPlaY
Learning Perl or Going To Die Trying
  • Comment on Canadians (and possibly other non-US monks) Buying Perl Books Online

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RE: Canadians (and possibly other non-US monks) Buying Perl Books Online
by Malkavian (Friar) on Oct 31, 2000 at 00:53 UTC
    O'Reilly have a distributor in the UK, which gives pretty good prices..
    Ordering from their home pages goes through the system to a UK company (John Wiley & Sons), who despatch the order...
    The prices, far as I can tell are a conversion from dollars to sterling at the current exchange rate..

    Malk.
    *I lost my .sig. Do you have a spare?*
[reply]
RE: Canadians (and possibly other non-US monks) Buying Perl Books Online
by AgentM (Curate) on Oct 30, 2000 at 23:13 UTC
    Actually, the Germans have it pretty good. if you order from Amazon.de, you get FREE shipping (did he say free? YES, I said FREE shipping!) perhaps this is true of other amazon branches and amazon usually has around 10%-20% off the retail price AND YOU HAVE TO TRY OUT THEIR PATENTED ONE-CLICK(tm) ORDERING- which is very much like the submit button I'm about to click below. But amazon is afraid of guys with bug guns.
    AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.
[reply]
      Actually, not only Amazon.de offers FREE shipping, but also buecher.de, wich are cheaper on some (not all) of the O'Reilly books.
      And you can order all O'Reilly books through O'Reilly.de.
      Bigger bookstores also stock O'Reilly (in the original and in translation).

      neophyte

[reply]
        ORA prices are volatile as the US$ is. :-( & :-)
        But more interesting in fact are newer offers alike "lion.cc" who attempt to undermine the price fixing for books (yeah, we have, don't forget the german ambitions).
        However all of the above turns out, I still prefer to go to a well sorted book store, where they have all ORA and all Addison Wesley. And there I hang out and read and buy the books I need. :-)
        E-commerce is something quite nice, but can't replace well working and comfortable procedures in all places. Hmm, may be I should ask for rebate or perhaps a coffee next time {grin}

        Have a nice day
        All decision is left to your taste
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RE: Canadians (and possibly other non-US monks) Buying Perl Books Online
by footpad (Abbot) on Nov 02, 2000 at 21:15 UTC
    Two other sites to consider:

    computerbookstore.com often has sales of 41% off titles by a specific publisher.

    abebooks.com is a portal site for many used book stores and contains a search engine that locates available stores and lets you limit searches by specific countries as well as convert prices to your local currency. I've used this to find out-of-print titles and used versions of many technical books. The tech books are often at least 50% off retail. For example, a search performed a few minutes ago listed a copy of Learning Perl, 2nd Ed. for $8.00.

    hope this helps...

    -- footpad

[reply]

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