== Welcome to the 5C Book Exchange!

This is a web app i created to simplify the process of buying and selling textbooks for 5C students. Why did I make this app, when there are so many different services (Chirps, Huntley, SwoopThat, Ebay, Amazon) that we can use to buy and sell books? Because at the end of the day, I've never been satisfied with these methods and usually end up feeling ripped off. Why is the 5C-Book Exchange any better?

  - No shipping:
    Your books are rarely more than a mile from your dorm. This means no shipping costs, and no wait. You search for a book, and have it within hours, if not minutes. And since you get to meet the seller in person, you can be sure of the condition of the book before making any commitment to purchase.

  - No extra fees:
    When you buy or sell a book on Amazon or Ebay, even if it's used, the middleman gets a cut of the money. Why do we even need the middleman?

  - Tailored to 5C students and their classes:
    Every year, the exact same classes are offered on the 5Cs, over and over. And unless a major revision is released, the same textbook is often used for a number of years. So why do we even need an outside source for the majority of our textbooks?

  - Simple to use:
    To sell a book, all you need is a 5C email address. To buy a book, you don't even need to sign up! The 5C Book Exchange is dedicated to a single task, so I'm able to focus on doing it right. There isn't a lot you can do with this site, which makes it incredibly simple to use. The hassle of just setting up a seller account on ebay is enough for many students to return their books to Huntley at a considerable loss.


TODO list:

When Huntley updates courses for Fall 2012, KEEP old books database, DROP old courses database. Rerun script.  
Refactor out transactions for faster request processing

For future:
Try postgres 9.1 shared!
Send email to users asking for feedback

Courses and Books data (5-21-2012):
Total Courses: 1566
	-Materials not finalized for this class: 617
	-No books needed for this class: 162
	-Could not find the specified course: 280
	-This course has optional materials: 7
	-This course has a bundle available: 58
	Courses with materials: 442
	Courses without materials yet: 1124
	Courses with one book: 1362
	Courses with one finalized required book: 238
  Courses with more than one finalized required book: 204

Total Books: 848


Useful Heroku DB Commands:

curl -o mydb.dump `heroku pgbackups:url --remote production`

pg_dump -Fc -U rails book_exchange_dev > ./db/backups/mydb.dump

heroku pgbackups:restore SHARED_DATABASE 'https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/path/to/uploaded/db/mydb.dump' --remote production

pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -U rails -d book_exchange_dev ./db/backups/mydb.dump