In a recent post Eran Galperin takes a look at the PayPal API and breaks it down into smaller, easy to digest chunks to show you how to you can implement it in your application. Be warned, though - he mentions that it's the "among the worst API he's ever had to deal with" for several reasons.

PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments. The relative ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account for a traditional payment gateway is the number one reason, and another is the comprehensive API they provide for their payment services. [...] There doesn't seem to be any better alternatives currently, so hopefully this guide will help ease the pain for some of you out there taking your lumps working the API into your applications.

Eran starts with a look at some of the different payment options, express, direct, recurring and mass, and what they're good for. From there, it's off to the code with his tool of choice being curl to make it simpler to make requests with headers, content and fetch the response message. He's put together a little custom function to make it easier to reuse. As an example, he shows how to make an Express Checkout request by grabbing a token and redirecting to the PayPal site for handling.