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 endeavorswhether 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.

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 endeavorswhether 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.

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.

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.

Beginning Google Maps Application with PHP and Ajax is the first book to comprehensively introduce Google’s popular mapping application programming interface (API). The author team has considerable experience building Google Maps-driven applications, and they cover all aspects of the API. They show you how to create practical, location-based applications that encourage users to interact with the service, add their own information, and dynamically mark up maps.

The book begins with a series of fundamental examples to help you quickly gain familiarity with the API. Then you’ll soon be building highly interactive and dynamic mapping applications with the help of the PHP scripting language. You’ll learn how to "tag" and interact with maps in order to foster a community-driven experience. And you will discover how to take advantage of third-party geocoding services such as Yahoo geocoding and geocoder.us, as well as use the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line data to host the service internally.

Must buy
If you are going to get one book to learn or improve your Google Maps skill, this is the book. This very well organized book introduces you the basics and then moves on some advance staff that you have to learn if you want to develop serious Google Maps application.
You can check out the table of content and sample chapters from its website.
I enjoyed reading it and therefore I highly recommend it for Google Map developers.

From a Web Programing Instructors point of View
Wow and Kool are the first words that come to mind after reading just the Into and Chapter 1.

As a Web Programming Instructor, I am always searching for easy ways to get my students motivated. Page 2 of Chapter 1 shows an XML and XHTML strict - but the code is so straight forward - that you are not in the least intimidated with the strict XHTML. To find something students can relate to that gives a solid example of two abstract things - is great. There is nothing to be intimidated with, the explanations are clear and the web site - give corrections. Each chapter offers a lot fore each level user.

Chapter 1 is fun for a wide range of web skills: Web Development, Digital Photographers, Digital Imaging, and more advanced.

Chapter 2 - gives the JavaScript, XHTML developer’s lots of detail on what is going on in the script. Each exercise builds on the previous one, until by the end of the chapter you have a robust program, you can use immediately.

Chapter 3 - adds user input, it begins the discussion of adding to a Database & Ajax. You have a dialog wit the authors of why they did what they did - it’s insight to working with a database. The chapters keep getting richer and draw you in. You hate to put it down!

Appendix B has a generous 28 page summary of the important API commands, making learning Google Maps API easier.

I am adding this to my Reference Book list
and it will defiantly be a required reading for Advanced PHP classes.

Jil MacMenamin
http://JilMac.com

Very clear and focused in real solutions
This book is very well written. Very concise, clear and focused in the real world problems and solutions. Following the advices and codes of the book, you will can afford most of your google maps projects knowing exactly what to do, and how to do it. I specially find very interesting the chapter dedicated to how to code a map with multitude of markers. Very clarifying.

Must have-read book if you are working in a Google Maps project.

Excellent Intro to Google Maps
Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax, provides a very easy to understand clear path for getting started with Google Maps. As a PHP developer, (not as much javascript), the book shows an intelligent and useful approach to working with client side scripting and document objects. Great samples throughout the book. I highly recommend this for anyone getting started with Google Maps, regardless of PHP or Ajax...this book is still very useful for any developer.

missing code, examples not completely laid out
I am a fairly inexperienced, self taught programmer. I bought the book partly due to the fact that it had "beginning" in the title.

The code that is used in the book is not laid out very well. There are parts of the code that they don’t explain (such as what apikey.php is) until you go and find out on their website what it means.

They are also very inconsistent. Sometimes they used apikey.php and sometimes they didn’t. Going through the examples they use the same file names for different examples so you don’t know if you are suppose to use the old files from the previous examples or not.

Even after I got all of the files that I needed for the tile overlay example it failed on me. This is after spending 3 hours reconstructing the MySQL table (which I didn’t care about) because that information wasn’t provided with the tile overlay example. After doing all of that work and using their unmodified code (except to change my database logins and api key) the code didn’t work. And it failed BEFORE it even got to the MySQL database which means all that work I spent was for naught.

The authors suggest that you can email them (and I did a couple times) and they will get back to you. Its been several months and I still haven’t heard back from any of them. The questions were about problems using their unmodified code.

This book may be good if you have some experience with coding. But on the other hand if that is the case there really isn’t any need to buy the book.

An absolutely excellent roadmap to Google Maps API Integration
This book was an absolutely incredible guide to the nuances of the Google Maps API. It clearly goes from simple integration, to geocoding to more complex functions such as overlays etc. I found it absolutely invaluable for my project, and I’m sure you will too.

Understandable
I found this book to be very readable and easy to follow. It doesn’t just rehash old ideas but gives new ways to do things with clean code. I am a beginner in maps and have got so much out of this book already.

Great book, but annoying errors with Internet Explorer
I would love to give this book five stars because it is such a treasure chest of information and most of it is error free. However, the authors have failed to test their examples in Internet Explorer with the script debugging tool turned on. The overlays respond to clicks with the map event handler. Only the map should respond to the map click event handler, not the overlays. It’s easy to fix, by testing to see if the overlay exists before executing the click handler on the overlay, but it took me quite a while to figure it out. If the overlay exists and the click is on the overlay, it should not execute the map click code. I get annoyed when I notify the authors of an error and it gets ignored. I can go to their website right now and click on their examples using Internet Explorer and get an error.

Great book, but check author’s website for a few corrections
I should have given this book five stars because it is such a treasure chest of information and most of it is error free. The authors also maintain an awesome website with corrections to a few instances where something got missed. If something doesn’t work right in Internet Explorer with the script debugging tool turned on, check the website for updated code. For example, the overlays respond to clicks with the map event handler. Only the map should respond to the map click event handler, not the overlays. It’s easy to fix, by testing to see if the overlay exists before executing the click handler on the overlay. If the overlay exists and the click is on the overlay, it should not execute the map click code.

Well done
I am using this book to build a mapping application. I’m a beginning-intermediate web programmer and find the book well designed. There are nice sections on improving the user interfaces of map applications, updating maps with data queried from a database, and plenty of good examples (also posted on the book’s website). It’s a good all around case study in developing dynamic websites with JavaScript, custom controls, databases and PHP. There is a positive review on Slashdot as well.