Programming for Betfair: A Guide to Creating Sports Trading Applications with API-NG

If you are interested in writing custom applications for Betfair, I would highly recommend this book.I currently use two commercial applications for trading Betfair, which are both extremely versatile, but occasionally I found the need to do things slightly differently. I always thought about building a bespoke application, but whilst I knew of the API, I didn’t really know where to start – something the book solved.Buying the book spurred me on to get started, and I am now up and running - though with a lot more work to do. The learning process has made me realise how good some of the vendor applications actually are.In this age a lot of folk are used to having an eBook to copy and paste from and initially I groaned at the omission. I learnt to code before the internet age, and copying examples from books and magazines really helped me understand how the examples were working – which is essential when you need to change something, or develop something new. The typing looks worse than it actually is, and with Intellisense in Visual Studio, it really isn't that much of a chore. Whilst building the application in the book, I encountered occasional issues, but after first checking the excellent addenda webpage, I usually found it to be my typing errors.I think James would be the first one to say that the application built throughout the book is not what you should be building and using to actively trade on Betfair, but the GUI acts as a way to demonstrate what is required, and how basic functionality is achieved. Personally I completed the application, saved it as reference point, then started new projects and pulled in the routines/functions that I needed.The code in the book is concise, well laid out, and has useful comments. There is no waffle or padding, which is refreshing. It is easy to follow if you have some basic programming experience in a language like VB/VBA, and even if you haven’t, the majority of it is fairly straightforward for someone who wants to learn to program. Some of the techniques in the book were new to me, but I stepped through it with the debugger and it all made sense.

When I got this I'd done no more with regards to coding than watching a couple of YouTube courses on python.The most important thing that this book taught me was to understand interacting with the API with JSON requests and responses, as Betfair's documentation was not very helpful to me .At first I would have agreed with what some others have said about the choice of programming language, given the (lack of) popularity of Visual Basic, but after making some progress on a similar simple application with Python and PyQt, as well as researching which GUI frameworks are available for other languages, I realised that if you want to make a GUI application then considering the GUI framework before the language might be better, and Visual Basic is actually a very good choice of language for this book considering how easy it is to make a winforms app in Visual Studio.I've since decided that c# is the language I want to develop my Betfair apps in, and I think that considering it's similarity to VB (and compatibility with winforms which the book uses), but increased popularity, perhaps this book would have been best created in this language, but it has been easy enough for me to rewrite the app in c# so I don't think that this should put anyone off.

As an amateur coder who has done a bit with Visual Basic and more so with Visual Basic for Applications I thought this book would be ideal for me. I didn't want to write sophisticated trading software I just wanted to know how to grab prices from Betfair to start with, so I figured I could follow this and modify the code as I went.The first thing that really irritated me was the VB editor telling me I had errors in my code almost every time I wrote a snippet. When in fact the errors were because they were referencing a bit of code I hadn't written just yet.No mention by the author that this would happen and to stick with it. The authors website states that almost all errors are down to my typing and not his typos. Although he admits there are a couple in the book that he later corrects on the website.I found myself going over and over my typing to correct my (non existent) errors only to eventually discover that most times I had to write a bit more code to get the previous errors to disappear.I got so far into the book and building the program when I realised, and was then informed by the author, that Betfair regularly change their API code so any successful software that I could write using the book would need regular tweaks to continue to work.But ... as the book is not designed to be a teaching manual, just a "do what I do" follow along book then once Betfair change something minor your program will cease to work until you fix your code.And ... you can't fix your code because you don't know how to code, you only know how to copy the code in the book.If he's going to just let you copy his code to build an 'app' then it would have been much better to let you copy/paste all the code snippets from his website and use the book to explain what that code snippet is, what it does and why it's needed. This way it may give you the chance to repair your 'app' when Betfair makes a change.Without the authors personal intervention when your 'app' crashes you are basically left in the cold. And I don't see the author wanting to debug everyone's app when they stop working.All in all unless you are proficient enough to fix your software later down the road I would avoid this and look at something easier.There are several 'trading' programs already out there for very reasonable prices that can interact with Excel where you can set up an auto trader much easier. And you can let the software vendors worry about tweaking the software.

Disappointing, it just usual stuff

Salve a tutti.Ho acquistato questo libro con l'intento di scrivere un mio bot su Betfair.Innanzitutto tutto ciò che c'è all'interno si trova in gran parte anche nella guida ufficiale delle API-NG, viene usato Visual Basic per creare il bot di esempio e il mercato di riferimento è relativo alle corse di cavalli; insomma, per l'Italia non è il massimo, avrei preferito Java o C++ con gli esempi sul calcio che sono leggermente diversi dalle corse.Il libro per me è stato efficiente solo per gli step da seguire, l'ho usato come linea guida di base, ma ho creato il mio BOT in Java e dopo i primi capitoli l'ho abbandonato.Lo consiglio per chi è alle prime armi, sia come programmazione che come conoscenza dell'exchange.Il Libro è stampato in formato A4, molto scomodo! Avrei preferito un formato più piccolo.Delle 136 pagine le ultime 40 o 50 sono solo di codice Visual Basic per il bot.P.S: L'autore ha un blog che pubblicizza nel libro.

Der Autor hat sich offensichtlich selbst einen Bot gebaut. Dieser ist - aus meiner Sicht leider - in Visual Basic. Java, C# oder C++ wäre mir lieber gewesen. Aber dann sind wieder die Visual Basic Programmierer unglücklich. Butler geht von einem Programmier-Lehrling aus. Er erklärt Schritt für Schritt wie man einen lauffähigen elementaren Bot baut. Wobei nicht nur der API-Kode selbst sondern auch das Design einer Visual-Basic Form erklärt wird. Das ist für Programmierer in anderen Sprachen nicht so spannend. Der Text enthält aber nicht das übliche Blabla sondern beschreibt präzise und knapp was gemacht wird. Der Grossteil dürfte sich auch direkt in andere Sprachen übertragen lassen.Der Bot ist entsprechend den Interessen des Autors auf Pferderennen zugeschnitten.Das neue API ist ein Work in progress. So hat sich seit Drucklegung des Buches das login geändert. Diese Änderungen sowie errata werden auf der homepage des Autor aktuell nachgezogen. Die Homepage enthält auch eine Reihe von Interessanten Information zum Thema (Pferde-)Wetten.Man hat den Eindruck, dass der Autor weiss von was er spricht. Er hat auch ein gewisses Talent die Konzepte prägnant und einfach zu erklären.Das Buch ist nicht perfekt. Aber es ist gediegene und sorgfältig gemachte Handarbeit. Das ist in Zeiten in denen sehr viele schleissige Bücher auf den Markt kommen schon etwas.

The accompany website really not what it made up to be, have to find workarounds as Betfair changed somethings with API that don't agree with code, nothing too difficult though nothing on "website" to help.