Product Description

Until recently, building interactive web-based mapping applications has been a cumbersome affair. This changed when Google released its powerful Maps API. Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax was written to help you take advantage of this technology in your own endeavors--whether you're an enthusiast playing for fun or a professional building for profit. This book covers version 2 of the API, including Google's new Geocoding service. Authors Jeffrey Sambells, Cameron Turner, and Michael Purvis get rolling with examples that require hardly any code at all, but you'll quickly become acquainted with many facets of the Maps API. They demonstrate powerful methods for simultaneously plotting large data sets, creating your own map overlays, and harvesting and geocoding sets of addresses. You'll see how to set up alternative tile sets and where to access imagery to use for them. The authors even show you how to build your own geocoder from scratch, for those high-volume batch jobs. As well as providing hands-on examples of real mapping projects, this book supplies a complete reference for the Maps API, along with the relevant aspects of JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and SQL. Visit the authors' website for additional tips and advice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179561 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Michael Purvis is a mechatronics engineering student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is a mostly self-taught programmer.

Prior to discovering PHP, he was busy making a LEGO Mindstorms kit play Connect 4. Currently, he maintains an active community site for classmates, built mostly from home-brewed extensions to PunBB and MediaWiki.

He has written about CSS for the Position Is Everything web site, and occasionally participates in the css-discuss mailing list. He particularly enjoys those clever layouts that mix negative margins, relative positioning, and bizarre float tricks to create fiendish, cross-browser, flexible-width concoctions. These and other nontechnical topics are discussed on his weblog at uwmike.com.

Offline, he enjoys cooking, cycling, and social dancing. He has worked for We-Create, Inc. on a number of exciting PHP-based projects and has a strong interest in independent web standards.

Jeffrey Sambells is a graphic designer and self-taught web applications developer best known for his unique ability to merge the visual world of graphics with the mental realm of code.

With a bachelor of technology degree in graphic communications management along with a minor in multimedia, Jeffrey was originally trained for the traditional paper-and-ink printing industry, but he soon realized the world of pixels and code was where his ideas would prosper.

In late 1999, he cofounded We-Create, Inc., an Internet software company based in Waterloo, Ontario, which began many long nights of challenging and creative innovation.

Currently, as director of research and development for We-Create, Jeffrey is responsible for investigating new and emerging Internet technologies and integrating them using web standards-compliant methods. In late 2005, he also became a Zend Certified Engineer.

When not playing at the office, Jeffrey enjoys a variety of hobbies, from photography to woodworking. When the opportunity arises, he also enjoys floating in a canoe on the lakes of Algonquin Provincial Park or going on an adventurous, map-free, drive with his wife.

Jeffrey also maintains a personal web site at JeffreySambells.com, where he shares thoughts, ideas, and opinions about web technologies, photography, design, and more. He lives in Ontario, Canada, eh, with his wife, Stephanie, and their little dog, Milo.

Cameron Turner has been programming computers since his first VIC 20 at age 7. He has been developing interactive web sites since 1994. In 1999, he cofounded We-Create, Inc., which specializes in Internet software development. He is now the company's chief technology officer.

Cam obtained his honors degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo with specialization in applied cryptography, database design, and computer security.

Cam lives in Canada's technology capital of Waterloo, Ontario, with his wife, Tanya, son, Owen, and dog, Katie. His hobbies include biking, hiking, water skiing, and painting. He maintains a personal blog at CamTurner.com, discussing nontechnical topics, thoughts, theories, and family life.

Customer Reviews

Excellent book
When I bought this book I'd not tackled any Ajax/PHP or serious Javascript and hadn't tried to use the Google Maps API, having said that I'm a reasonably competent programmer and I had a project to focus on. From that start this book has been excellent. It does a good job of explaining what can be done with the API and builds on humble beginnings to create more advanced mapping applications.

I can also highly recommend the authors website which provides additional information and downloads. I even emailed them with a question and received a detailed response within a day or two. Now that's quality.

So if you are thinking of writing a Google Maps application and you want a good launchpad this book is for you. I highly recommend it.

A really helpful book
As I am currently working on my final year project, which involves placing markers on a map given their GPS coords, I find this book very helpful. It starts off nice and smooth, covering the very basics - the Google Maps API concepts, simple Javascript and PHP scripts. I got through all I needed after reading the first 60 pages, which is absolutely fantastic!
However, it gets more and more complicated as you turn to pages 60+ and after the first hundred you're bound to lose track of things unless you are actually interested in "Optimizing and Scaling for Large Datasets".
I couldn't, really, couldn't give the book a full 5-star rating for numerous reasons:
*Throughout the text there are many weblinks refering to cool manuals and tutorials and god-knows-what on the Net, which is fine. But didn't I buy a paper copy (of material otherwise quite accessible on-line) just because I didn't want to read about everything on the Net?
*The title of the book - BEGINNING Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax - implies that this book will be rather for novices, slowly picking up more advanced topics and possibly include a chapter for professionals. Which it is not. I was quite upset by the fact that it's actually quite advanced from page 62 onwards. I am familiar with Ajax and PHP on a beginners level, and I hoped this book will fortify my knowledge of these technologies and fill in the gaps. Which is paritially did, but I couldn't say I was too satisfied.
*Some screenshots totally useless and a terrible waste of space. One gets the feeling that they were desperate to add a couple of pages to make the book thicker and sell for more bucks, when you look at several half-page snapshots of not much (e.g. here's an empty info window, here we filled in some data in the info window, here we closed the info window and the form was not saved - now where's the sense in that? two pages just to show a non-functional info window?)
I know I tend to be very critical in my reviews, and I often lift up only the negatives, but I certainly do not mean to say don't buy this product. I gave it a 4-star rating and I believe it's just what the book deserves. It's good. It helped me a lot. And I do not regret making my purchase.