Three days ago I ordered two books on Amazon.com. In 24 hours after I placed my order I got a message from Amazon with confirmation that my credit card has been authorized. Hurray! Amazon also confirmed order has shipped. Nice, isn’t it. I said to my self: In two weeks you will smell your brand new books at home. But what’s that? Amazon inform me in their message that estimated delivery date: December 16, 2005. Hm, how could it be - let me ask. Don’t you have any aricrafts there, in USA?
Let’s see it in details. So, two clicks on the Google Map Pedometer and I have distance between the middle of the USA and the middle of Poland. The result is 8196.531 km or if you prefer miles, then it’s 5093.088 mil. OK, so how many days this trip will take? December 16 minus October 26 gives 51 days! Maybe they will ship my books on the raft, who knows :-) So, the only think I can do is to accept it. I only hope they don’t wet my books in the ocean. Huh? OK, here are a few more calculations made by Google, just for fun: 8196.531⁄51 = 160.716294 km per day and this gives 160.716294⁄24 = 6.69651225 km/hour. Not so fast :-(
Finally, I think I should say a word about the books, So here you are:
Web Mapping Illustrated by Tyler Mitchell
Tyler is a geographer, enthusiast and developer of Open Source Software. He contributes to many projects. You can catch him on IRC channels #gdal i #qgis on the irc.freenode.net IRC server. I also recommend great podcast by Hobu - Interview with Tyler Mitchell.
Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh
To make shippment costs lower I decided to order second book. First, it was one of MapServer book but Tyler suggested me to buy this one - Mapping Hacks - for learn and fun.
By the way, Amazone.com sells Tyler’s book about 10$ cheaper than O’Reilly :-) When I get and read those books I will write some review.
