Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very helpful to use PayPal
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: nothing you cannot get from official documentation but...
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If your a PHP Programmer...
Comment: If your a PHP programmer I would recommend that you buy both this book and the book "Web API's with PHP". Neither of the books is a one-stop solution for integrating paypal with php. But, using the books in conjunction with each other, an experienced programmer shouldn't have any trouble taming PayPal. Learning to uses the PDT, IPN or API from these two books is FAR EASIER than trying to chase down answers on PayPal's site and web forums.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What you need, when you need it.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good until you get to Paypal API
Comment: 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
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