eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Getting Started with the Code in This Book

One of the ways eBay Hacks is different from other eBay books you might’ve read is that the solutions contained herein are not limited to the features available on the eBay web site. Rather, the hacks in this book make use of other websites, third-party software tools, and programming code you can type in, customize, and run yourself.

Tip

You don’t have to type any of the code in this book by hand! Just go to ebayhacks.com, click The Hacks, and select the hack or section in which the code appears.

Some of this code is simple, requiring no prior experience and only a little patience. Depending on the task at hand, though, some other code examples may require some programming experience and a larger amount of the aforementioned patience. (Each hack is adorned with a little thermometer to indicate its complexity, as described in “Conventions Used in This Book,” later in this preface.) What follows is a little background on the languages and concepts used in the hacks that employ code.

eBay’s home is the Web, a heterogeneous place governed by well-defined standards. In most cases, the concepts presented in this book work with any programming language or platform you might be using with your web site. However the example code is primarily kept to three language and platform combinations, each inhabiting its own niche of the Internet ecology: HTML for creating web content, JavaScript for adding interactivity to web pages, and Perl for server-side ...