Product Description

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 andtools, "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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #252000 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-09
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 564 pages

About the Author
Schuyler Erle was born in a small paper bag in Philadelphia, and then again five days later in Baltimore. As a youth, he had to get up every morning two hours before he went to bed in order to walk fifteen miles uphill to school, and then another seventeen miles uphill to get home in the evening. After many years of some nonsense involving Karnaugh maps, a botched attempt at a Red Cross sailing certificate, and the early works of Chomsky, Schuyler was finally and at long last sent packing with something his mentors found at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Later, after a tragic accident that left him nearly completely lacking in common sense, he served brief stints on Phobos and Ganymede with the Space Patrol, before returning to study n-dimensional unicycle frisbee golf at a yak herding collective in Miami. Somewhere along the line he made the grave error of attempting to implement a full-scale multi-user web application using a combination of tcsh, awk, and sed, which lead him straight into the arms of O'Reilly & Associates, first as a reader, and then as an author and humble developer. Four years & fifty thousand miles later, we present him in his full and unabridged form, where he hacks Perl behind the scenes at the O'Reilly Network, does on-site technical support for ORA's fine conferences team, is involved in a variety of database and production development projects across the company, and still manages to write and give conference talks for ORA from time to time.

Rich Gibson is a Perl/Database programmer in Santa Rosa. He has worked professionally with computers since 1982 when he created Public Utility Rate Case Models in SuperCalc on an Osborne II. His current fascination is creating tools to aid in the acquisition, management, and presentation of information with a geographic component. He is currently converting an old golf cart into a mobile geo annotation platform.Rich is active with the NoCat Community Network in Sebastopol, California, and is the primary developer of NoCat Maps (http://maps.nocat.net/).

Jo Walsh is a freelance hacker and software artist who started out building web systems for the Guardian, the ICA and state51 in London. She now works with the semantic web, spatial annotation and bots.

Customer Reviews

It was OK
It is definitely about a bunch of hacks. There were a few hacks that I was able to use. Hacks wasn't what I was expecting, but for those that need those hacks, it is definitely the book that contains a lot of important hacks in one place. You could probably google most of the information and save a little bit of reading time.

Interesting read, but obsolete at time of publication
I should begin by noting that while I am a competent programmer and geocacher, prior to reading this book I knew only as much about mapping and cartography as I could glean from episodes of NOVA and my childhood orienteering training. It is my suspicion that those more familiar with mapping technologies could make better use of some of the hacks in this book, so my review will be necessarily incomplete as I am not in a position to evaluate or even comprehend the more sophisticated hacks.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of this book is the introductory material toward the beginning that discusses some of the theory of mapping, geocoding, and computer navigation. Arguably I learned more from this material than from any of the more specific technical hacks.

For a great many of the hacks, however, the book is a victim of bad timing. While today (and even at time of publication) the Google Maps API is the de facto standard mapping system on the web, and Google Earth is certainly the best designed and most thorough free end-user GIS program, O'Reilly's Mapping Hacks makes no mention of either. This was a supreme disappointment for me and, I would think, anyone who was hoping this book could provide guidance for developing the latest and greatest Google Maps-enabled web application. If O'Reilly follows this with a new edition (which I very much hope they do) this major deficiency will obviously be rectified.

Some of the neatest hacks, however, are ideas that many of us have thought about in the backs of our minds but have never seriously tried to implement. These generally also do not depend on any particular mapping API, mitigating the foregoing concerns. I am particularly fond of Hack 16, which supplies the reader with information on a variety of useful geopolitical statistics websites, and Hack 62, which introduces Perl functionality I didn't even know existed and is instructive on mapping GSM cell sites. (After all, everyone has wanted a nice map of cell coverage just like in the TV series "24," right?)

Overall, I would recommend this book to those interested in learning what is possible to do with computer mapping, but who are also willing to go research more modern innovations to supplement the book's material. For those seeking more shake-and-bake recipes (as are frequently found in the excellent "Hacks" series), lobby O'Reilly for a new edition!

Too bad I already knew most of this stuff
I didn't really get a lot out of this book. I took the title to mean that it had code for online mapping. Not so much. It was kind of fun to browse through, but not what I was looking for at the time. It's one of the reasons I buy most of my books at a bookstore instead of online.