Mathematica 8 on sale at Amazon

In preparation for a course I am teaching over Fall, I have been learning/following Mathematica quite closely. I found out last week that Amazon has a sale on "Mathematica 8 Home Edition" for $239.

I've never used Mathematica extensively in the past, for three reasons:

• the price sucks ($1000+ bucks, if I try to buy it directly from Wolfram).
• I do not really need it for my research,
• my department has a site license for teaching, if I need to use it.

But it is an amazing piece of software. I always suspected that it was. Now that I am learning how to use it better, I am finding that it is even more amazing than I thought it was.

Under different circumstances (if none of the above three reasons were valid, for example), I would probably buy it.