Russell - PayPal APIs: Up and Running

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There has never been a better time to have a keen interest in commerce. The Web has truly accelerated globalization and connected us all through a common network. Information can now be shared at mind-boggling rates, and entrepreneurs everywhere can truly reach a global audience if theyre clever (and sometimes lucky) enough to supply the market with what it demands. However, this is old news. Back in the mid-1990s, not long after the Internet officially birthed the Web, buyers and sellers could already transact through eBay, and PayPal soon arrived as the de facto way for money to change hands with the least amount of friction. Fast forward a decade or so, and a lot of exciting things have happened. eBay acquired PayPal back in 2002, and while PayPal continues to be the preferred way to exchange money on eBay, it has since evolved into a powerful platform that offers a vast number of API-based products that allow you to monetize your ideas as seamlessly as possible. If youre interested in tapping into these tremendous possibilities, this book is for you. As an Up and Running title, it doesnt provide complete or exhaustive documentation on all of PayPals products or even provide very specific direction on handling some of the most common idiosyncrasies that you might encounter. However, it does aim to present some of the most popular products in fully integrated realistic scenarios with sample project code that you can study and adapt for your particular needs. As the title suggests, this book is designed to get you up and running; it is not a definitive guide.

Each chapter focuses primarily on the topic of integrating commerce payment flows into a reference application thats provided in . While one viable approach to demonstrating the integration of PayPal products might have been to introduce a distinct sample application in each chapter, a pragmatic decision to use a single application as a foundation and customize it in various ways according to the content of each chapter was chosen instead. This approach hopefully has the virtues of the sample application being sophisticated enough that its realistic, fun, and useful, while still allowing each chapter to stand alone and be as atomic and instructive as possible.