Want to find every pizza place within a 15-mile radius? Where the dog parks are in a new town? The most central meeting place for your class, club or group of friends? The cheapest gas stations on a day-to-day basis? The location of convicted sex offenders in an area to which you may be considering moving? The applications, serendipitous and serious, seem to be infinite, as developers find ever more creative ways to add to and customize the satellite images and underlying API of Google Maps.
Written by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, authors of the popular Mapping Hacks, Google Maps Hacks shares dozens of tricks for combining the capabilities of Google Maps with your own datasets. Such diverse information as apartment listings, crime reporting or flight routes can be integrated with Google's satellite imagery in creative ways, to yield new and useful applications.
The authors begin with a complete introduction to the "standard" features of Google Maps. The adventure continues with 60 useful and interesting mapping projects that demonstrate ways developers have added their own features to the maps. After that's given you ideas of your own, you learn to apply the techniques and tools to add your own data to customize and manipulate Google Maps. Even Google seems to be tacitly blessing what might be seen as unauthorized use, but maybe they just know a good thing when they see one.
With the tricks and techniques you'll learn from Google Maps Hacks, you'll be able to adapt Google's satellite map feature to create interactive maps for personal and commercial applications for businesses ranging from real estate to package delivery to home services, transportation and more. Includes a foreword by Google Maps tech leads, Jens and Lars Rasmussen.
Chapter 1 Infrastructure As Code
The Origins of Infrastructure as Code
The Principles of Infrastructure as Code
The Risks of Infrastructure as Code
Chapter 2 Introduction to Chef
The Chef Framework
The Chef Tool
The Chef API
The Chef Community
Chapter 3 Getting Started with Chef
Installing Ruby
Getting Set Up on the Opscode Platform
Installing Chef
Using Chef to Write Infrastructure Code
Chapter 4 Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
A Very Brief History of Agile Software Development
Rich Gibson is a Perl/Database programmer in Santa Rosa CA. He has worked professionally with computers since 1982 when he created Public Utility Rate Case Models in SuperCalc on an Osborne II. His current fascination is creating tools to aid in the acquisition, management, and presentation of information with a geographic component. He is currently converting an old golf cart into a mobile geo annotation platform.Rich is active with the NoCat Community Network in Sebastopol, California, and is the primary developer of NoCat Maps (http://maps.nocat.net/).
Schuyler Erle is a freelance writer and software engineer. After several years developing web applications for O'Reilly, Schuyler has recently moved on to pursue his interest in free networks, digital cartography, the Semantic Web, and technology for social and political change. He is the chief architect of NoCatAuth, a leading Open Source wireless captive portal. His interest in digital cartography stems from a life-long fascination with maps and mapmaking, coupled with his experience as a co-founder of the NoCat community network in Sonoma County, CA, where he collaborated in the development of geographic analysis tools for wireless networking.
I bought this book in February, when v1 was current, and found it very helpful for learning how to use the API, and a lot of fun. Even though I had almost no experience with JavaScript before using the book, the examples were all very understandable. Now that version 2.x is online, I still use the book, but need to modify the code, of course, making things somewhat less convenient. I eagerly look forward to a new edition, hopefully with new examples in addition to updates of the basic ones. Those who need an introduction to the API should probably wait for this edition to be released before making the purchase.
6/1/2006
(1 of 1 customers found this review helpful)
3.0
Helpful and Illustrative
By Nitancy
from Undisclosed
Comments about oreilly Google Maps Hacks:
This is a good read. It showcases some great things people have done with Google Maps.
However, giving this book a rating was challenging. I found the book very informative and helpful, but it was all based on the old 1.0 API. I guess that is what happens when you write about a cutting edge technology! :-)
Overall I though it was a 4 - Very Good, but the 1.0 API dropped it down to a 3 - Good.
Can't wait to see the next edition.
5/9/2006
(3 of 3 customers found this review helpful)
1.0
Disappointed
By drNH
from Undisclosed
Comments about oreilly Google Maps Hacks:
Much of this book is already outdated. It relies on v1 of Google Maps and they're up to 2.5 now. If you're a sophisticated programmer, that might not matter to you, but then you wouldn't need this book. You can find the same examples on the web and look at the code without spending $29.
