Electronic-funds-transfer Books

This was quite in an ineresting read with realistic views about E-Commerce and the dotcoms.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that needs to quickly come up to speed on E-Commerce technologies as well as those of us that must keep abreast of the latest changes. The chapters on "Security Technologies", "Strategies, Techniques, and Tools", and "Designing and Building E-Commerce Web Sites: Hands-On" were particularly good. A must-have reference for your technical library.

While there's been a lot written about e-commerce, the fact that this book is in its third edition (Is e-commerce already that old?) speaks to its high quality. Not only does it provide excellent overall coverage of the topic, but it offers new material in keeping with the growth of e-commerce, including B2B, investing on-line, and supply chain management. Given the many concerns about e-commerce security, I was particularly impressed by the treatment of security technologies, electronic payment, digital currencies,and protocols for private information transport--especially since author John Vacca is a security expert; having serviced as a computer security official with NASA.

John Vacca has provided a virtual encyclopedia of e-commerce. There is something for nearly everyone in this book. The thumbnail sketches of e-businesses contain useful and interesting information about their histories, development, and scale for the general reader, and as all of us purchase more and more goods over the Internet, who doesn't want to know about what is happening with digital wallets? For those with a more technical orientation, there are discussions about the replacement of EDIs with VANs and the resultant advantages to businesses both large and small, as well as information about the embedding of contextual transactions as a marketing tool and critical requirements for creating digital commerce solutions. The final chapters are written for those people who are planning to build new sites or improve upon current ones. They include step-by-step, how-to discussions and vital strategies for keeping e-businesses viable through the use of good marketing principles.

We are an IT company engaged in the development of electronic commerce/distributed database software that is designed to support both government and commercial supply-chain management business- to-business operations. In this brave new world of network infrastructures, firewalls, security requirements, etc., the need to stay current with technology change is critical. The Electronic Commerce, Third Edition provides a source of knowledge that helps fulfill this need. The authors have produced a book that is easy to read and understand, and yet, provides just the right amount of technical detail to do justice to the subject at hand. The following chapters provide the right level of information to help IT managers and software engineers make sound strategic and tactical decisions regarding business-to-business implementation decisions; (2) Security Technologies, (4) Protocols for the Public Transport of Private Information, (9) Strategies, Techniques, and Tools, and (10) E-Commerce Environments and Future Directions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If you work in the payments, credit card or finance industry this book is great. It has a very easy to read history about credit cards, who knew Diners Club invented the category in the 50's. But more importantly is how the industry is moving forward and progressing.

Overall, this is a book you read if you need to, but I can't imagine anyone outside the industry reading it. You would have to be the most intellecually curious person in the world if you read this cause you were interested in how credit cards work.

I loved this book and how the author talks about the fine points of credit cards and how American consumers got hooked into it. A terrific read and it is money well spent, although FREE shipping would have been nice!

It is a very difficult and ambitious task to write a book about an industry combining indispensable facts and history, fundamental business aspects and subtle economic insights. Yet this is precisely what the authors have done for credit cards, the digital quantum leap in the evolution of payment instruments. It is a very rewarding and fun read, providing the equivalent of a comprehensive 3D animated view of the organization of credit card companies (not-for-profit associations like Visa or for-profit firms like American Express) and of the complex ecosystem that surrounds them: banks, merchants, cardholders, regulators, ATM networks, etc.
And the "lens" of "multi-sided platforms" that Evans and Schmalensee use to conduct their analysis turns out to be so appealing and insightful that one wonders how economists, policy-makers, business people and even casual observers managed to make any sense of this industry before.

Paying with Plastic first edition has been revamped, rewritten and repositioned here with edition number two.

Most important, Paying with Plastic "2.0" addresses new developments of online payment processing. The authors correctly begin to question the requirement of a merchant set top box for reading "antiquated magnetic stripes".

"Old is new" item #1. Frank McNamara's Diners Club platform would cost about $50,000 to set up today. What's the next mutiny of merchants?

Old is new item #2. Sears starting up Discover and getting to more merchants tha American Express -all within 2 years. Moore's law (doubling within time) would suggest the next Discover would ramp up in less time.

Old is new #3. Industries in decline, lobby best. The payment industry's recently raised interchange rates. Does technology cost more?! No, but growth is stagnant.

Old is new #4. Whoops, John Reed (ex-ceo of Citibank) pulled their Visa membership (p14) and moved the Mastercard logo to the back. Why?! Pull the entire Citi into a closed loop - Citi wanted to be like Amex and Discover. There will be more banks doing this like Chase (Octogon) or MBNA (PayPass).

Old is new #5. Wal-mart as a bank. See Sears above in #2. Wal-marts pays fees to V/MC/D/Amex but they'd rather charge fees and lend money. Why just make $2.00 on the VCR when you can make $10 on the financing. By the way, I like the payment system name, "Wallycard"... just kidding.

In this history of payment cards, David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee provide an amazingly lucid account of a couple of unusual business models: the "two-sided platform," which in the use of payment cards means walking a tightrope between the interests of merchants and consumers; and the "co-opetitive," in which the bank members of MasterCard and Visa cooperate in developing industry practices while competing for business. The authors, who are both former Visa consultants, sound like your favorite college professors - up to date and extremely sophisticated, yet friendly and anecdotal (at one point, they describe a Shell gas station near MIT to make a point about competition among cards). They typically begin chapters with easily understood notions from which they methodically build complex structures of ideas and information. Another virtue of the book is its concreteness - although that occasionally devolves into repetitiveness - starting with an explanation involving electronic signals and following the paper path of what happens when you hand your credit, debit or charge card to a cashier. The authors even consider the design and manufacture of the cards themselves. We recommend this book as essential reading for those in the banking or payment card industries; and it's not a bad idea for card users to read it - which these days means you...and just about everyone else.

I think his analysis is compelling, but can you really establish a methodology in a time when the nasdaq in constantly fluctuating

I can say without hyperbole that this book is 1,000 times better than any book ever published. Electronic commerce jumps to life and dances on the pages in front of you.

This text offers great insight into the sectors comprising the world of E-Commerce. The chapters are well organized and contain great detail on trends and pitfalls to be aware of when selecting stocks. Though the book lists the stocks that comprise each sector, the book falls short with providing meaningful insight to what companies are well positioned currently or will be in the near future. This book is strong in evaluating the E-Commerce sectors but has limited value in identifying individual stock investment ideas.

Excellent! This book is a definite must read for anyone who is either currently investing in Internet and E-Commerce stocks or considering investing. How to Invest in E-Commerce Stocks, gives the reader not only the knowledge of the sectors that make up E-Commerce, but the market potential, trends and success factors. Mr. Burnham's analysis shows where the "Elephants" of the industry are, those companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, and whether they will have a negative or positive impact on these new emerging stocks. It is a jungle out there, so knowing where and how the niche stocks fit in and how they can avoid being trampled by the "Elephants" is of utmost importance.

This is an excellent review of the e-commerce industry but don't be misled: it is NOT a how-to book in the classic sense; there are no step-by-step instructions or specific strategies. In this sense, the title is misleading. In all other respects it is a very good book.

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.

PayPal, like Amazon and eBay, has become a utility for technological civilization. You can buy, sell, or contribute to a worthy cause. Safer and easier than using a credit card, PayPal is changing the way we transact.

That's why "PayPal Hacks" is great. Not only is PayPal the most known and convenient way to deal with money on-line but there are some significant business processes that need to be thought through for brick and mortar retail. Not every hack will apply but many will inspire new ideas and bring some increased awareness. Using "PayPal Hacks" will let you take things at your pace and the bite-sized nuggets let you get started immediately.

You will need some decent computer skills to get past the first few hacks, and unless you do business on IIS you'll need to rework the code examples. The good news is that once you get going you'll probably be glad you took the journey.

This is basically a book on how to get the most out of PayPal. Whether you are trying to make a purchase, sell and item, or setup a complete e-Commerce solution based on PayPal you will find the information on how to do it here. Some of the information in the book includes how to create an account, what to do when you forget your password, how to get things fixed if your account has been limited, how to pay from a cell phone, dispute a payment, receive money, upgrade your account, lower seller fees, hack-proof your payment buttons, and even encryption. It even has information on the PayPal webservices API and putting a PayPal payment button in an email.

This is an excellent and detailed course on how to use the intricacies of PayPal. PayPal Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools is highly recommended to everyone who shops or sells on the Internet as well as anyone who programs sites to use PayPal.

no this review is not about this book its about how ironic it is that amazon sells books ABOUT paypal but for some reason doesn't use it, i don't like to pay with a credit cart i want to use paypal.

and if you ask amazon about it they just sent you a standard letter about credit carts and some un-clear buying opsions, un-clear because if you ask about the opsions you just get the standerd mail again

amazon -if you are reading- please use paypal, or explane why you don't use it, also drop the standerd mail it din't answer my questions the first time.

thank you.

Like all the "Hacks" books from O'Reilly, this one is quite solid. There's plenty of info about the things you know about but don't quite understand, as well as things you didn't know anything about.

Of course, it runs into the problem that any book of this nature runs into - which coding language to use for the examples. Personally, I'd like to see a bit less code and a bit more high level discussion about the concept of what the code should be doing (and thus be able to easily translate into any programming language).

But overall, this is a solid buy.

This is an excellent resource for anyone who would like to sell
their wares or services using PayPal.O'Reilly has done an
excellent job with the Hacks series in general and this book is
no exception.The book contains many useful tips & tricks for
anyone wishing to use Paypal as their main e-commerce
solution. I really recommend this book for anyone who is
serious about selling their wares over PayPal.

this book has gathered information about payment system as good as possible.I hope every one that like E_banking technology see this book!

This book is from 2001 so it is definitely not up-to-date. In one table, it compares 25 different companies that offer payment options on the web but only 4 or so are even around. So I'd be wary about paying $88 for information that may not be too trustworthy. Seems geared more towards academics than professionals.

I believe this book is a good technical study in the bits and bytes of how payment systems work, yet lacks the real-world applications, value propositions, and financial information on why some payment systems work, and many others are complete failures in the real world. Technology is only one segment of the payment arena.

For those who are seeking the alternative topologies in Electronic Payment systems this book is a very good starting point with some very good references as well. Gives a good insight on the mechanisms as well. One downside is that too much emphasis is put on maths for security related subject compared to the general aim and tone of the book.

If you want a great overview of electronic payments, the various schemes in operation and how they work, this is the book for you. I downloaded the eBook version of this book to do some research on electronic payments and it proved invaluable. I have read only the following sections in detail: overview, security techniques and micropayments, but I would say the book is worth the price just for the lucidity, structured presentation and breadth of coverage of these chapters. The chapters on credit cards and other forms of ePayments look just as well written based on my cursory look at them. The language is precise and non-obfuscatory, readable by managers and technical folks alike, while providing a depth of detail adequate to design your own systems based on these principles, unlike your typical technical book! However, the eBook version has certain extremely annoying featires which compel me to give this book only 3 stars as opposed to the 5 stars it deserves: you can't print even a single page, you can download it only to 3 computers (which is a pain if you have a PC and a laptop at home, and a work PC, and if you then want to refer to it when on a business trip or vacation from another PC), and you can't copy and paste even a word from this document. Draconian copyright measures, if you consider that you can do all these things with a paper version of the book. This is exactly the kind of arrogance on the part of eBook publishers that's going to kill the industry, because I will never buy an eBook again unless I have no choice. If you aren't in a tearing hurry, I'd say get the paper version.

This book filled in all the "holes" in my education in the area of money and economics. It gives a detailed history of the evolution of money from the beginning days when money had it's own intrinsic value, thru the moment when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard to the present where money now exists as an abstraction, just numbers on a computer screen backed by nothing. The author distinguishes between the real economy and the financial economy, and how the financial economy created an interest driven, electronic economy that is now completely out of touch with the real economy, having a life of its own with no regard for human beings or anything else other than numbers and the financial well being of the people who know how to manipulate those numbers. He points out the social implications and destabilizing effects of this new money system on individuals, families, businesses, countries and on the future of our species. What is now required is a new level of integrity and trust. The level of integrity that was sufficient to operate in in the real economy of yesterday, is no longer sufficient for relating to, and operating within, the interest driven, electronic economy that is backed by agreement and trust alone. What I got out of reading this book is that money is no longer what I thought it was. I relate the new economy of money to driving a car. When we all got our driver's license, we agreed (in the US) to drive on the right side of the road. For the most part (with the exception of drunkenness etc) we all keep that agreement. Keeping that agreement creates a condition of workability. It allows for a consistent flow of traffic so that each of us can successfully reach our destination. We also trust that other drivers will keep their agreements about driving on the right side of the road, that "red" means stop and "green" means go etc etc. Driving is a system based on agreements and trust. Included in this system are strong consequences (laws) if people break their agreements. Driving on the left side of the road not only endangers lives, but also will lead to strict fines, loss of the privilege to drive and, perhaps jail time. This is a perfect analogy for the new economy. It is based solely on agreement and trust.
The author points out that what's missing are: 1. consequences (stricter laws) for people who violate that trust and who break their agreements, and, 2. people waking up to how the new non-money economy works.This book is that wake-up call
Although published in 1993, it is absolutely relevant today and into the future.

An interesting subject, to me, and this book does cover some issues that were relevant in 1993. However, the author seems to lack a solid foundation in the subject he discusses. A mistake was made in the description of how options work. Claims that the electronic economy has destabilized the world's markets are made but essentially not backed up. Probably not worth the time to read, unless you have a lot of spare time.

This book was written 11 years ago, so some of its information is dated, but its basic premise has only become stronger: that the nature of money has changed from a tangible medium of exchange (i.e., cash) into a complex and chaotic system of computerized balance sheets and numerical flows.

The Federal Reserve estimates today that the entire worldwide supply of US money is currently about 10 trillion dollars ($10,000,000,000,000). This includes cash, savings accounts, checking accounts, money market funds, and other kinds of bank deposits.

But only 700 billion (or 7%) of these dollars are paper cash dollars circulating outside of bank vaults, of the sort you can carry in your wallet. If everybody wanted to cash out their bank accounts at the same time, there simply wouldn't be enough paper dollars to go around. Banks would have to close temporarily while the Federal Reserve printed more cash. I don't know how long it would take to print 9 trillion more paper dollars ... let's see, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing typically prints $40 billion per year, so at current production levels it would take over 200 years to print all the cash required if everybody demanded all their cash at the same time.

The kind of money you can hold in your hand is pretty much obsolete.

Unless you are a drug dealer, you probably pay for most of your purchases with checks, credit cards, or debit cards. You might also pay for some of your purchases via automatic deductions or e-banking. This book vividly explains the complex, evolving, and essentially uncontrollable system underlying these non-cash forms of payment.

This book is good only for people who are really discovering the online world. Basically it's a list of web links with a one page comment giving a high-level summary on the site's content. Don't expect to find advanced tips driving you to unknown features of a web site. Some of the sites mentioned don't exist anymore, but this is understandable given what happened in the dot com industry. On the positive side, it's interesting to note that even if the book is published by Microsoft, the Microsoft's web sites are not getting more visibility (some actually would deserve it).

We finally have a simple easy to use guide on how to use the computer for true money management.This book is well written and has some great illustrations. We need more books like this.

Smart cards are poised to invade two billion wallets and purses by the year 2000. If you have a credit card, chances are it will have a spider-like chip holding all your essential data. Even your mobile phone uses a smart card. But there are more applications to come, and with it diverse business opportunities for the organisation or individual who is always looking ahead. Smart Cards, edited by Catherine Allen and William Barr with Ron Shultz, breaks the mindset of looking at smart cards merely as an electronic purse. It expounds on the many possibilities that this wafer-thin chip-in-a-card can do to revolutionise the finance and retail sector. In short, it talks about smart-card technology. But don't just take it from me or any of the authors--arrive at your opinion from the cast of major players in the smart-card industry that the authors have assembled. Besides streamlining commercial transactions, the smart card will also have a hand in decentralising the storage of personal information. Hospitals will be able to access a patient's medical history just by reading the individual's smart card, thereby saving precious time in an emergency. At the airport, the smart card will make queues at the check-in counter disappear as travellers can check in electronically with their cards. Besides focusing on the application benefits of smart cards, this book also addresses the stumbling blocks of electronic commerce, namely privacy and security issues. A whole section of the book is catered not only to the issues of privacy but also the existing technologies to counter this problem. Innovative business individuals interested in leap-frogging ahead will benefit most from this book as it forces you to re-think standard business models in electronic commerce. Smart Cards also provides fertile ground for new smart-card applications because it showcases many ongoing trials and pilot projects. My only disappointment with the book is that its research is mainly based on corporations in the United States, a country whose advanced telecommunications infrastructure is actually a disincentive to the adoption of smart-card technology. Europe and some part of Asia, on the other hand, have been more than enthusiastic in their use of smart-card technology, and should be able to offer more real-world insights into the nature of the beast. On the whole, Smart Cards provides a good reading of the pulse of the industry and gets you up to speed with the business opportunities of "intelligent cards" that may soon slim that inch-thick wallet of yours--maybe in more ways than one!

This book has everything that you may need to know about smart cards. It contains a series of well-written in-depth articles by the experts in the field. Smart cards are the technology of the future -- and they may remain that way. The previous review predicts a smart card revolution for the year 2000. Here it is. Y2K has come and gone. Where are my smart cards? The reality is that the most pervasive use of smart cards has come about by government directive. The King of France has decreed that you cannot use a phone without having a smart card. Much touted experiments for smart card use in the United States have been failures. These include smart card electronic purses for the Atlanta Olympics and for Manhattan. It may just be that smart cards are not a compelling technology.