Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice) [Paperback]

Damon Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1590597508 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597507 | Edition: 1

With over 100 million users, PayPal has more accounts than Discover and American Express combined. Since its inception in 1998, PayPal has quickly grown to become the global standard for online payments and is constantly expanding into new countries, languages, and currencies. PayPal offers a wide range of payment technologies, but it’s not always clear which is the best choice for a website. This book gets under the hood to show you how the different technologies work, how to choose the right solution, and how to implement it - complete with real-world examples.

This book shows developers how to integrate PayPal directly into websites to make use of its payment technologies. This allows developers, no matter what language they program in, to build shopping carts or similar channel products with PayPal as a payment option. Merchants can also use this book to find out the basics of e-commerce, where PayPal fits in, and how they could take a DIY approach to solving their e-commerce needs.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Damon Williams has worked at PayPal since 2004, where he has specialized in making life easier for people trying to integrate PayPal into websites and applications. His background is in software engineering, community building, and content publishing. He is a certified Java developer with over seven years of experience, and he also spent five years publishing a magazine in Austin, Texas. His current position is managing the PayPal Developer Network, where he is building an online community for innovation and support on the PayPal commerce platform.

Product Details

• Paperback: 279 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597508
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597507
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #792,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Damon Williams has worked at PayPal since 2004, where he has held positions including developer support, software engineer, manager of PayPal's Developer Program, technical evangelist, and business development. He has a background in writing and publishing and has a knack for taking complex topics and making them accessible for a wide range of people.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good until you get to Paypal API, July 22, 2007

By 

Phillip Glau "Phil Glau" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

The book did a good job of covering everything EXCEPT the Paypal API. It had a smattering of samples in PHP, Java, C#, VB, and Perl up until that point.

Once the PayPal API is discussed, there are only a couple of samples and everything in Java despite the growing (and perhaps exceeding) popularity of PHP for website development. While not entirely the author's fault given the poor shape of PayPal PHP SDK, it was disappointing that so little time and explaination was given on how to use Paypal's API. If you're looking for help integrating PHP with the Paypal API for Website Payments Pro or Express Payment, you're out of luck. This book won't help.

This is unfortunate since the Paypal API is the most complex part of integration and perhaps the reason you would buy a book like this since many of the other integrations such as IPN are fairly easy by comparison.

The book does do a good job of working you through IPN integration, so if that's what you need, then this book will help.

Having had to now try and learn the PayPal API on my own, it does seem like it's fundamentally 'over-complex' and Paypals SDKs do little to hide the complexity. Perhaps the Java SDK is in better shape, but the PHP one is a bear to get configured and working correctly

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive treatment, March 26, 2007

By 

Trevor Baca (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

For all of PayPal's enormous growth in recent months, you would think that good documentation for developers would be plentiful. But this has not, in fact, been the case. Precisely because PayPal offers such a large number of different solutions for payments, reporting and fraud prevention, developers and online merchants have not always been able to easily select optimal solutions for their needs.

That should now be a thing of the past with the publication of Williams's "Pro PayPal E-Commerce". The book covers all PayPal payments options currently available, starting with the PayPal account and moving through basic and encrypted website payments, postpayment processsing, and the PayPal API. Instant Payment Notification (IPN) and Payment Data Transfer (PDT) are covered in detail. Payflow Pro and Payflow Link, formerly of the VeriSign family of payment services (acquired by PayPal in 2005), form the basis of chapter seven.

The book focuses on developers throughout with, for example, code samples covering both SOAP and Name-Value Pair (NVP) access to the PayPal API. The nine chapters organize by solution type, concluding with transaction variables, payment variables, currency variables and error codes in the appendix.

"Pro PayPal E-Commerce" provides the best explanation of all PayPal services currently available. And because PayPal integration has always been more about picking the right solution for your buyers and your business than about numbers of lines of code, Williams's book comes at the perfect time for a large and growing community of online merchants and developers. The experience of our engineers here at Jaduka lead me recommend the book strongly.

Trevor Baca
VP Software Engineering at Jaduka

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PayPal E-commerce in a consolidated, easy-to-follow format., March 14, 2007

By 

Jason Reckers - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

It's refreshing to see a book from the source. Damon has taken the collective knowledge of his day-to-day role and delivered a book that answers all of your questions about building a professional e-commerce solution with PayPal.

The book starts with an overview of the PayPal Payment options and helps the reader narrow down which solution is right for them. Then, each solution is clearly defined with code examples and screen captures to help guide you through the process.

Having worked with hundreds of small businesses, I can see how this book would be highly effective in the hands of small business owners. They will not only be able to determine which solution is right for them, but will also learn what is involved in building that solution and better understand what their future upgrade path may look like.

Everything you want to know about building an e-commerce solution with PayPal is in this book and I highly recommend it to developers as well as small business owners, corporate executives, and department managers who are looking for an overall understanding of the PayPal transaction processing solutions. The bottom line with books like this is effectiveness; and in Pro PayPal E-Commerce Damon has done an excellent job of clearly illustrating the management and development paths required to build and deploy practical and cost effective e-commerce projects.