I was afraid this book would be an "ebay for dummies". Fortunately, it's not. The book assumes you already know the basics of buying and selling on eBay, or can easily figure it out. This is the kind of book that, were O'Reilly not pushing a "Hacks" series, might be termed "tips and tricks". They say hacks are "'quick-and-dirty' solutions to programming problems or interesting techniques for getting a task done." (Compare the jargon file definition).
The foreword is by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. The chapters are broken up into "Hacks for All", "Hacks for Buyers", "Hacks for Sellers", and "Hacks for Developers".
Each chapter has maybe a dozen numbered hacks, and the numbers are displayed
prominently on the colored page corners. (I think they were just looking for
more places to use the teal color). Screenshots are in Mozilla on Windows,
and the whole book is very Windows-centric. Which makes sense, in a way:
most eBayers use Windows, and certain eBay-provided tools, like Turbo
Lister, are only available for Windows. To be fair, the author points out
alternatives for Mac and Unix whenever he discusses windows-based software
(but I think he should have given the Gimp more credit when discussing photo
manipulation tools).
Some of the hacks are ways you didn't know about to use eBay's website and
tools. Some of them are ways you can use your browser or other common
software (example: use Ctrl-F to search for the word "complaint" in a
feedback page), and these I would describe more as "tips" than "hacks".
However, there are a lot of actual sneaky clever hacks. For example: eight
different ways to contact somebody if your emails aren't getting through.
What all the query string variables are, and how to use them to make your
own links (which you can then embed in a html page on your own server).
There's even a table showing the extras you can buy when you submit an
auction listing—things like 5¢ for a Buy-It-Now button or $99 to
be featured on the front page—with recommended minimum prices for when
that feature will be worth the money. Maybe not a "hack", exactly, but a
very useful piece of information.
Karp emphasizes that eBay is a community, a place, not just a website. To
back this up, there are plenty of hacks relating to strategy and social
engineering. Like making the most out of the feedback game (when not to
leave feedback, how to get negative feedback removed), and sneaky ways to
find rare items or get the seller to end an auction early and just sell the
item to you (which must be done carefully to not run afoul of ebay
policies).
The chapter on photos didn't contain any surprises for me, but then again, I
already know how to take good pictures and use the Clone tool. I was very
impressed by the feature box explaining how and why to adjust JPG
compression. (I was less than impressed, though, by the javascript and
java-based "solutions" to image copying. The watermark is good advice, but
anything beyond that is just silly.)
The chapters on selling and running a business (and, assuming you're
profitable, the API—see below about that) seem like good advice to
those looking to really get into eBay. My only gripe there is that he didn't
talk about the security issues of taking people's credit card numbers.
Everything he did explain is correct—you want to use a secure
connection for the web form, and not email the numbers anywhere— but
simply storing credit card information in a world-writable plain text file
on your webserver is not the way to do it.
The guy knows ebay, but his coding leaves a lot to be desired.
When Rob offered this book at the meeting, he said that it contained "nasty
perl code". Rob, you didn't know how right you were. For one thing, it
parses the CGI input with something called cgi-lib.pl. What is this? I
thought. Surely it's some super-leet, special purpose extra spiffy perl
program that's better than CGI.pm and yet for some reason hasn't been made
into a module. But no. I asked some people who know perl better than I do
(read: I went to #perl on freenode) and the responses ranged from "holy
shit" to "um, you might want to upgrade to perl 5". They confirmed my
suspicions that cgi-lib.pl is "deprecated" and "suck-ass". They also added
that it was "insecure" and "pollutes your namespace". One person even
offered a quote for my review, involving unfavorable comparisons to Matt's
Script Archive. I've been blunt enough, I think, so I won't quote it here.
The HTML isn't so great either. I'm willing to forgive a lot of the bad
advice, though, because of the unique nature of ebay auction pages. Normally
you want to code for the ages, because the page you put up today might still
be there in the wonderful magical future when browsers that aren't
standards-compliant have gone extinct. But when it's a 7-day ebay auction
that will be archived for 30 days, I can deal. So I gritted my teeth while I
read about how to code with tables and font tags and iframes. The font tags
are unneccessary, but the tables I can tolerate. Iframes are actually one of
the hacks: you can use an iframe to include some text from a page on another
site, so you can change that text anytime you like, despite the restrictions
ebay has on changing the information of a running auction. I think the worst
hack, <style> tags in the <body> of the page, is in a sense the
best. <style> tags belong in the head of the page, not the body, and
it's not valid to put them in the body. But you only have access to an area
of the body of the page, not the head. And if you use <style> tags to
put a stylesheet in the body, browsers will usually render the stylesheet.
Best yet, because of the cascading nature of stylesheets (the C in CSS),
anything in your stylesheet will override anything in eBay's stylesheet,
allowing you to style the whole page. You can add a background image or
change eBay's color scheme.
At least the code is explained well. Rather than just numbering the lines,
this book's scheme uses a circled number each time something important
happens in the code. A circled (1) next to the variable declarations, say.
This makes the explanations a lot clearer to read.
As it turns out, eBay does offer an API, which only makes up one chapter of
the book (the very last chapter). This is the chapter I wanted to
read. Throughout the first seven chapters, I saw URL hacks and
screen-scrapes and kept wondering: why don't they use the API for this? The
API chapter, unfortunately, gave a good reason: eBay charges money for it.
They have four levels of licensing, the cheapest of which is the Individual
license, which allows for 50 API calls per day, with no fee. You get to
develop your programs by querying a fake sandbox server, and must be
"certified" to be able to use it on the real site. Certification costs $100
per application (more for the paid services). Bah.
If you're looking for a book about HTML or Perl, this isn't a good book for
you. But it is a good book about eBay. Karp knows all of the useful tools
eBay offers, and third-party tools too (such as esnipe.com, for easy
automated sniping). He knows the ins and outs not just of buying and selling
but also of searching and shipping. He provides detailed analyses of
whether, when, why and how to use various eBay features, such as the reserve
price or the checkout option. If you're looking for a book about HTML or
Perl, there are better ones (hint: look for a <a
href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3">camel on the cover) but it
would be hard to find a better book about eBay.
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