Is it common practice to redirect for skipping www?

I want to advertize my website as mydomain.com. For me it looks nicer than www.mydomain.com. Is it a common practice to trim this www. part with redirection? Somebody would go to http://ift.tt/1rQM1as and I would redirect him to mydomain.com/books. Are there any potential traps behind this idea?

Another reason is making third party callback URLs simple. For now, I need to declare both http://ift.tt/2aOuP9Y and http://ift.tt/2aQxfSj as my redirect URLs, because Google considers them different. It's not a huge deal, but something extra to take into account.

If it's safe to trim www., how can that be achieved? I'm using PHP on Apache.