Paypal for Dummies

The reason I bought this book to learn how to add PayPal to my Web-based business, but while reading this book, I discovered that this is a wonderfully comprehensive book on the capabilites of PayPal and what it has to offer. If you want to go beyond making a payment on eBay by using PayPal, PayPal for Dummies, like most of the "for Dummies" books will get you started and answer basic questions. What I discovered was that I could install some payment buttons on my website for my Web-based business as well as add some donations buttons to any non-profit organization. PayPal For Dummies had all the information I needed and more to achieve various goals and the information was easy to find. PayPal For Dummies explains how to establish a PayPal account, deposit or withdrawal money from your PayPal account, create multi-user access to your account, accept payments in international currencies, use PayPal to help shipping merchandise, and create a shopping cart with buttons for purchasing merchandise on your website or making charitable donations from your website. Overall a good reference book for the person trying to know and understand PayPal.

If you want to get beyond making a payment on eBay using PayPal, PayPal for Dummies, like most of the "for Dummies" books, will get you started and answer basic questions. I needed to install some payment buttons on a small-scale website for a non-profit organization that needed to accept donations and sell a few books on-line; and for this, it had all the information I needed and it was easy to find it. My one caveat is that the book is a bit out of date. PayPal has updated their "button factory" so that it now creates encrypted buttons by default. The instructions in *PayPal for Dummies* mostly focuses on regular HTML-type buttons. (Plain HTML buttons are easy to understand, but not very secure.) Anyway, if you are expecting an exact correlation between the book and the PayPal web interface, you won't get it. I hope they update the book soon. I bought the book for the web application. There is also information on the way PayPal can be used to send and receive payments but I didn't pay too much attention to that part.

I realise that these book reviews are supposed to serve mainly to critique the authors' abilities to impart knowledge on the given subject matter (and the case of this book that was done well) but I thought it was important to also comment on the subject matter itself. Firstly, on the quality of the book; this book is well written, covers a lot of ground and I would recommend it to people of almost any level of technical expertise wishing to use PayPal. However, after learning the nuances of PayPal, I have to say that I am not completely sold. The PayPal service, although offering some excellent tools for web developers and non-developers alike, has quite a concerning "Big Brother" air about it that does not instill confidence in me to trust my money with these people. Reading PayPal for Dummies prompted me to dig a little deeper into the terms and conditions of PayPal as well as seeking out other people's experiences with the service to find some disturbing feedback (try www.paypalsucks.com to start with). Of course a company as large as PayPal is going to be the target of some flack but when we're talking about the potential loss of control over one's personal funds (large amounts in some cases), this brings a whole new level of concern. All in all, PalPal has the potential to be a great service but, at the moment, has a way to go before it wins my trust.

PayPal is much more than a payment system for eBay. This is a wonderfully comprehensive book on the capabilites of PayPal. After reading this book I am going to use PayPal to accept credit card payments for my Web-based business.