http://www.googlemapsbook.com with PHP or Rails and AJAX: From Novice to Professional Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:43:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Ok, just one more post then we're out of here for good. Thanks for everything. You're all awesome. Apress has just released what was scheduled to be the "2nd edition" of our book written by Gabriel Svennerberg: Beginning Google Maps API 3. If you're looking for a book to get started, ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2010/07/18/beginning-google-maps-api-3-released/ As of this month (February 2010), GoogleMapsBook.com will be converted into a static HTML archive and be completely decoupled from PHP and Wordpress. Four years on and the book is still selling really, really well (THANK YOU ALL!), but it's become obvious that this site and the book are only useful ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2010/02/06/frozen-in-time/ One of the most frequent questions we get via email is "Your book is two years old. Is it any good now?" While only you can answer that question, we certainly think so. When we set out to write the book we put a lot of effort into the fundamentals ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2008/12/09/two-years-and-counting-is-our-book-still-useful/ I thought I'd share this with anyone who hasn't received it yet... Another example of what you could do with the maps interface and an alternative tile set like Jeff's blue-marble map. Starting today, astronomy enthusiasts can now view imagery of millions of celestial objects online - without downloading software. Google Sky brings ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2008/03/13/google-sky/ Rails 2 changed the way to_json works on ActiveRecord objects. Prior to Rails 2, to_json returned a hash of hashes -- the first level hash had the key 'attributes', which in turn had another hash with your field name/values. With Rails 2, calling to_json on an AR object just gives you ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2008/02/13/to_json-and-rails-2/ Amy writes "We just posted an article Top 50 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Google Maps. I thought I'd bring it to your attention just in case you think your readers would find it interesting." Indeed. Some of this will be well known to our readers, however our ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2008/02/13/50-things-you-didnt-know/ In the last few weeks we've seen an explosion of people complaining about the lack of asinh() on the Windows version of PHP. We use the asinh() function extensively in Chapter 7 for the custom tile overlays. Admittedly, we didn't test any of the code against windows versions of PHP ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2007/11/15/php-and-asinh-on-windows/ DragZoom (previously called GZoom) is my drag-to-zoom custom Google Map control I open-sourced last year. I'm happy to say the code has been incorporated into Google's own GMaps Utility Library. Thanks to Pamela Fox from Google for doing a lot of work to bring it in. You can now source ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2007/06/21/dragzoom-taken-into-google-maps-util-lib/ Hello All, We've talked and talked about adding forums to this site and decided against it. We already do all of the support we can by email and encourage anyone who has trouble with anything in the books to contact us that way. If the problem is common enough we'll blog ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2007/06/10/no-forums-sorry/ Our three week entry period is over and we have selected the winners of a free copy of Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional. From the over 450+ entries received we have randomly selected four lucky winners. They are: Ryan Irelan of Raleigh, ... http://www.googlemapsbook.com/2007/03/15/rails-book-contest-winners/