Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic Cartography

Amazon's Book Description

• Author: Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh
• Paperback: 564 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (June 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596007035
• ISBN-13: 978-0596007034

Amazon's Editorial Reviews

Since the dawn of creation, man has designed maps to help identify the space that we occupy. From Lewis and Clark's pencil-sketched maps of mountain trails to Jacques Cousteau's sophisticated charts of the ocean floor, creating maps of the utmost precision has been a constant pursuit. So why should things change now? Well, they shouldn't. The reality is that map creation, or "cartography," has only improved in its ease-of-use over time. In fact, with the recent explosion of inexpensive computing and the growing availability of public mapping data, mapmaking today extends all the way to the ordinary PC user. Mapping Hacks, the latest page-turner from O'Reilly Press, tackles this notion head on. It's a collection of one hundred simple--and mostly free--techniques available to developers and power users who want draw digital maps or otherwise visualize geographic data. Authors Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh do more than just illuminate the basic concepts of location and cartography, they walk you through the process one step at a time. Mapping Hacks shows you where to find the best sources of geographic data, and then how to integrate that data into your own map. But that's just an appetizer. This comprehensive resource also shows you how to interpret and manipulate unwieldy cartography data, as well as how to incorporate personal photo galleries into your maps. It even provides practical uses for GPS (Global Positioning System) devices--those touch-of-a-button street maps integrated into cars and mobile phones. Just imagine: If Captain Kidd had this technology, we'd all know where to find his buried treasure! With all of these industrial-strength tips and tools, Mapping Hacks effectively takes the sting out of the digital mapmaking and navigational process. Now you can create your own maps for business, pleasure, or entertainment--without ever having to sharpen a single pencil.

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Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits

Amazon's Book Description

• Author: Tyler Mitchell
• Paperback: 367 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (June 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596008651
• ISBN-13: 978-0596008659

Amazon's Editorial Reviews

With the help of the Internet and accompanying tools, creating and publishing online maps has become easier and rich with options. A city guide web site can use maps to show the location of restaurants, museums, and art venues. A business can post a map for reaching its offices. The state government can present a map showing average income by area. Developers who want to publish maps on the web often discover that commercial tools cost too much and hunting down the free tools scattered across Internet can use up too much of your time and resources. Web Mapping Illustrated shows you how to create maps, even interactive maps, with free tools, including MapServer, OpenEV, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. It also explains how to find, collect, understand, use, and share mapping data, both over the traditional Web and using OGC-standard services like WFS and WMS. Mapping is a growing field that goes beyond collecting and analyzing GIS data. Web Mapping Illustrated shows how to combine free geographic data, GPS, and data management tools into one resource for your mapping information needs so you don't have to lose your way while searching for it. Remember the fun you had exploring the world with maps? Experience the fun again with Web Mapping Illustrated. This book will take you on a direct route to creating valuable maps.

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Google Earth For Dummies

Amazon's Book Description

• Author: David A. Crowder
• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470095288
• ISBN-13: 978-0470095287

Amazon's Editorial Reviews

• This interesting guide covers all aspects of Google Earth, the freely downloadable application from Google that allows users to view satellite images from all points of the globe
• Aimed at a diverse audience, including casual users who enjoy air shots of locales as well as geographers, real estate professionals, and GPS developers
• Includes valuable tips on various customizations that users can add, advice on setting up scavenger hunts, and guidance on using Google Earth to benefit a business
• Explains modifying general options, managing the layer and placemark systems, and tackling some of the more technical aspects, such as interfacing with GPS
• There are more than 400,000 registered users of Google Earth and the number is still growing

From the Back Cover

• Explore foreign cities or find every ATM in your hometown!
• Map historic sites, look for a new home, or analyze traffic patterns

Want to see the world? Forget packing, customs, and airport security —with Google Earth, simply click and you're there. And it works just as well to find school districts and shortcuts in your hometown. This guide helps you install and customize the software, create specialized maps, tour almost any city on earth, and more!

Discover how to

• Locate specific businesses in any city
• Create a tour of homes for sale
• Visit historic sites in another country
• Insert your own 3D models
• Find alternate routes to work

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Google Maps Hacks

Amazon's Book Description

• Author: Rich Gibson and Schuyler Erle
• Paperback: 366 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (January 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596101619
• ISBN-13: 978-0596101619

Amazon's Editorial Reviews

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.

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Hacking GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth

Amazon's Book Description

• Author: Martin C. Brown
• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (July 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471790095
• ISBN-13: 978-0471790099

Amazon's Editorial Reviews

This one-of-a-kind resource contains 500 pages of jaw-dropping hacks, mods, and customizations. These include creating mashups with data from other sources such as Flickr, building a space station tracker, hacking Maps with Firefox PiggyBank, and building a complete community site with Maps and Earth. Now you can map out locations, get driving directions, zoom into any point on the globe, display real time traffic, and much more.

From the Back Cover
Going somewhere? Or just getting back?

Great vacation photos—too bad you can't remember where you took them. And wouldn't it have been terrific to find a pizza joint when you bumped into your college buddy in that little ski town? Well, by making Google Maps and Google Earth do your bidding, you can find out not only where you're going, but where you've been. Get an aerial view of the beach in that picture. Pinpoint every Thai takeout in your girlfriend's zip code. Plan the Great International Rollercoaster Tour. Here's how.

Get Going

Create applications that let you do all this and more

1. Make maps that reveal statistical data
2. Plot routes to include or avoid key factors
3. Build a community site
4. Create a realtor's presentation
5. Calculate distances for routes
6. Show where your holiday photos were taken
7. Merge Flickr photos onto a map
8. Highlight archaeological information

Companion Web site

Visit http://maps.mcslp.com to find full source code for all hacks and mods in the book, working examples, ongoing information about Google Maps and Google Earth, a blog, and more.

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