The first chapter gives a brief history of GoogleMaps and its API as well as showing KML, a simple technique for creating maps that I wasn’t aware of ? in fact, it’s probably the quickest way (especially for a non-technical user) to add a map to a web page.

Chapter two covers most of how to add a map onto your web page, setting the area, what controls appear on the map and adding marker points. For many websites, this might be all you need. – then again you could also work this out on-line, but the book is just getting started. Where the book shines is in showing how to go beyond the basics of changing the marker graphics or simple techniques documented in the API. The chapters that follow cover how to customize maps, particularly with the new features in version 2 of the API.

The sections include:

  • Getting started, creating your first map
  • Interacting with users and the server
  • GeoCoding addresses
  • Manipulating third part data (incl. screen-scraping)
  • Improving the user interface
  • Optimizing for larger data sets
  • Advanced tips and tricks
  • Lines, Length and Areas
  • Advanced geocoding topics
  • Appendix covering the API and a basic mathematics primer

What I liked was the attention to the practical issues of working with large datasets, specifically, what might work fine with a hundred or so locations, might not scale so well when working with a few thousand. Fortunately they cover lots of ways to optimize your application, both on the server and browser side. In fact, in some cases they show one way you could perform an operation (grouping data on radio towers) in PHP and, then how to do it using MySQL, and finally, how to improve speed further using MySQL 5’s views.

In chapter 7, this book gets interesting, covering advanced techniques such as boundaries, clustering to get around the problems with displaying larger amounts of data.

In the later chapters the book gets into the v2 Google Maps API where some amazing things such as replacing the map (the example given – using old maps in place of the satellite imagery- has recently been done by Google themselves) or creating custom overlays allowing for some truly interesting things.

Who would benefit from this book? If you just need to add a map to your business’s website, then you could probably figure that out reading through the API docs, same goes for modifying the marker from an pin into a snowman, this book will teach you this, but its value comes from going further than most sites I’ve seen go, in fact, much of what this book teaches isn’t being used on a lot of sites.