Customer Reviews

Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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

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.

All of the information that this book covers is available directly from PayPal at no charge, but then rendering it useful would be a major task indeed. Mr Williams has done that major task, and more, and made it accessible and useable by those who want to integrate PayPal's capabilities into their own eCommerce offerings, without having to build, support and (no small feat) pay for the development of the required infrastructure. PayPal may well be the National Cash Register for the 21st century, and while this book lacks the dazzle of a John Patterson, its relatively prosaic ways cover what has to be covered in detail and with commendable clarity. The first of the nine chapters is certainly required reading, but the remaining chapters can be studied on their own, allowing a software developer to focus on the implementation that immediately meets that business' specific requirements. This is a reference book for anyone who wants to use PayPal programmatically, with well presented and documented examples and descriptions, written for software developers by a software developer.

I also recommend Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds as a companion reference book, with an excellent and very readable overview of the PayPal system.

Starts by providing an overview of the methods available to interface with PayPal. Enough for you to decide the one(s) you need.

Each chapter then describes how to implement those methods. Example code is given. Nice charts and figures.

Useful for someone who needs to actually do the work.

This book doesn't offer nothing that you can't get from official documentation, but, sometimes look for answers in the paypal docs is time-consuming, and not as effective as whished. This book recopilates and order all that information in one resource, and that is the main reason to get it. I find specially interesting the appendix with all variables supported for the different paypal solutions.

I will give it more value if the book make an effort to give more information than the official doc. For instance, I will appreciate more info on Shipment, Taxes info. Other examples on IPN than the official ones, for instance, a PHP5 class to handle IPN will be valuable.

Good to have a wide view on options paypal has to offer, and good to save time of browsing to find a simple variable or reference.

Pro PayPal E-commerce is certainly a valuable and organized resource for developers as well as do-it-yourself merchants using or planning to use PayPal. It covers in detail all the PayPal solutions being offered since the earlier years to the latest NVP API.

It has something for everyone, from a complete beginner to an advanced developer. Rather than having to sort through quite a few manuals, you can simply use this book as a blackbook of PayPal solutions. This book is full of practical suggestions and code samples. Even after you go through the book once, you will certainly hang on to this great reference. The code
examples are good and you will find clear explanation of what a particular solution achieves and how to use it to suit your requirements.

Damon has effectively used his experience at PayPal to share his insights about how to choose and implement the best PayPal solution for your business. As someone who is about to take PayPal certification exam, I have to say that this book is really a life-saver.

This book is aimed squarely at developers, however it does not assume that the reader knows the first thing about PayPal, and the introductory chapters do not require any coding background to understand.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the problems that PayPal addresses, the services that PayPal offers, advice on when one service might be more appropriate than an other, as well as an in-depth coverage of how to work with each service and integrate the service into a website or web application.

Throughout the book, the author highlights gotchas and provides helpful tips, such as 'remember to write down the fake credit card number the first time it is provided, because that is the only chance you get'. It becomes obvious that the author has spent time with the development community answering the same questions time and again, and seeing developers make the same mistakes over and over.

The book is language-agnostic, with code examples from many mainstream languages. Developers who have experience programming in a single language may find it difficult to port the knowledge to their language of choice.

Though all of the information is freely available in various forms of documentation on PayPal's website, I would highly recommend the book if you are considering using PayPal as a payment option as it is cohesive and comprehensive.

This book is definitely one to add to your book shelf if you are a developer. From the novice to the expert developer, it has little nuggets of information that everyone can use. Along with lots of graphics (I love pictures), you get a plethora of code examples to help you along with your development. Instead of pointing and clicking on the PayPal website, you should add this one to your collections as it will be well worth it.

Even though I am not a website developer, I found this book easy to understand. I learned many new ways to use PayPal on my website to help me grow my business. Mr. Williams writing style in this book is easy to digest for someone who knows little about the PayPal service. Although there are parts of the book for more technically inclined individuals, there is plenty to learn for those who are not.