Product Reviews

If you've got any stuff you don't want, be it some old CDs or a kidney, you've probably thought of selling it at the online auction site eBay. There are even people who make their living from buying and selling on eBay. There are also crafty people who make a profit by helping the professional eBay players work the auctions more efficiently

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by writing programs that interface with eBay.

If you want to try this you have two choices. You can write HTML 'scraping' routines that attempt to pretend to be users that interact with eBay as if they were real human beings. The problem with this approach is that if eBay changes its way of working your programs fail. The alternative is to use the eBay API and do the job properly. As with any API, that means figuring out what all the documentation means. Ray Rischpater's guide isn't as useful as it should be because it provides nothing more than the information in the standard documentation. There are some examples, which help, but these constitute large chunks of code with comments at either end.

The book feels as if it has been rushed out. Those planning eBay applications may be anticipating big profits, making this book seem worth the price. However, the author should really have delivered more.