PayPal - it's not just for eBay anymore! As a small business owner who uses PayPal to process her credit card sales, I can attest to its overall usefulness, and to the improvements that have been made to its systems since eBay bought the company. (Yes, eBay - 900 pound gorilla of e-commerce and Dick Cheney's economic salvation). However, PayPal Hacks is a book designed not only for people like me, but for users of all levels — casual eBayer to programming Jedi.
The Amazon community seems to have a problem with the number of programming examples demonstrated using in Microsoft products. One quote:
"Many similar books from O'Reilly attempt to give examples in several languages, for instance, Perl, PHP, Python, Visual Basic, Java, etc. But this book only offers its wealth of examples in ASP.NET. Which is such a shame. Shame on you O'Reilly! It could have been so useful!!!"
I'd debate that - it's a great resource for users of all levels, and if you're someone who'd actually be making use of those higher end examples, chances are good you know how to substitute one for the other.
PayPal can be used for so many things - not only straight-up e-commerce, but also subscriptions, affiliate systems, and donations. You may have a PayPal donation button on your site already! But have you taken a look at all the other things it can do? This book will help you not only craft your own PayPal-based resources, but also find existing materials you can use.
As with other O'Reilly books, the writing in PayPal Hacks is clear, concise and purpose-driven, with excellent examples and iconography to describe each Hack's difficulty level, etc.
Some Hacks are worth the price of the book all by themselves - for example, setting up an affiliate scheme for marketing purposes. This book will not only lead you by the hand to some quality solutions, it will also launch new business ideas...just as PayPal itself did!
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1 - Bryce Eddings
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