Dear Reader,
Until recently, building interactive web-based mapping applications has been a cumbersome affair. That changed when Google released its powerful Maps API. We’ve written this book 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.
We get rolling with examples that require hardly any code at all, but you’ll quickly become acquainted with many facets of the Maps API. We 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. We even show you how to build your own geocoder from scratch, for those high-volume batch jobs.
We’ve had a blast researching and writing this book, and we really think it has turned into a great, comprehensive resource. As well as providing hands-on examples of real mapping projects, this book supplies a complete reference for the API, along with the relevant aspects of JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and SQL.
If you enjoy our book or you’ve built something cool related to Google Maps, we encourage you to let us know (we may blog about it). We hope our blog continues to be an ongoing stream of new pointers, ideas, and resources to help out fellow mappers.
Now, go forth and map the world!
Mike Purvis, Jeffrey Sambells, and Cameron Turner
