Resources

• Develop apps with Web services and the eBay SDK, Part 1 and Part 2: Before you start this tutorial, you may find it helpful to read two other eBay tutorials. The first one describes how to build a command-line eBay search engine in Java. The second one demonstrates how to build a book-distribution application with the eBay Java SDK and provides detailed information about the eBay authentication and authorization mechanism in a language-agnostic way.
  
  
• PHP Manual: A good place to start if you're just learning PHP. For this tutorial, you might want to skim through the following sections if you need a refresher: Classes and Objects, SimpleXML, CURL, and utf8_encode.
  
  
• There are a lot of good books on PHP, but I particularly recommend Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional , Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional , and Advanced PHP Programming . Additionally, Jack Herrington has written a good article on the PHP scalability myth.
  
  
• Services_Ebay documentation and resources are available at its PEAR repository and through the eBay Community Codebase.
  
  
• One of the benefits of the eBay XML API is that you can use XML techniques and frameworks. In particular, XPath is very good for extracting information. Chapter 9 of XML in a Nutshell gives a good overview of XPath, and it's online.
  
  
• The best place to learn about writing eBay applications is at the eBay Developer Zone. That's where you'll find documentation for the XML API that Services_Ebay uses as well as eBay's new XML API. eBay also has forums where developers can ask questions and a Knowledge Base with information that's not always in the documentation. In addition, whitepapers provide some of the business strategy for eBay's Web services.
  
  
• In addition to the educational resources that eBay provides, the company also has tools that make development easier: create a sandbox user, create a single-user authentication token, and use the XML API test tool.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• eBay XML applications: from first principles
• Using Services_Ebay
• Using Services_Ebay
• Error handling and debugging
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Migrating to the next schema
• Resources
• About the author

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