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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 13 Ratings

Great if you know nothing about free software - otherwise avoid the book... - 2006-06-30
Reviewer Rating:
To be short and to the point... the title basically covers the primary issue I had with the book... I felt most of the book could be summed up in about 20 pages but yet it was still a full book of how to go get a free piece of software, connect a GPS, and chart where you were going...

Note: I was most likely disappointed because I was truly looking for a much more technical discussion on how GPS databases work and how to decode GIS information. In the past when I have prucased books form the publisher they were much more in depth on technical aspects of the systems, data, and so forth. In this case it was a discussion of how to sue free software and a GPS... no truly what I had in mind.

Oh, well... other I'm sure will enjoy it... just didn't fill the bill for me...

Good overview of web mapping - 2007-02-17
Reviewer Rating:
This book is readable, nice to look at, and does a good job of pulling a lot of information into one place. Finding information about the different GIS packages in the web is a challenge. If you don't know GIS already, like me, you're lost. This book helped me find my bearings, and in no time I was able to take shapefiles, do processing on them, and display the results in a web page dynamically.
The problem with this book is that it's fairly shallow. It will give you a couple of basic examples of how to use some pieces of software, but for anything more complicated, you have to look elsewhere. There is frustratingly little information on mapscript, but, overall, I'd say the book fulfills its role.

MapServer, PostGIS, OGR etc. - 2006-03-24
Reviewer Rating:
Author doesn't assume you know anything. Examples are UNIX, but he explains very well. He doesn't talk down to Windows users (apparently Mapserver installs easily on Windows). Very exciting. Explains map projections well. Good reading on the airplane. If you're an open source geek and/or a GIS person and a UNIX enthusiast, you'll be very happy.

Great intro book to open source web mapping - 2006-03-21
Reviewer Rating:
This is an interesting, well written intro book for open source web mapping enthusiasts. I found some helpful tips and also appreciated the traps to avoid sections. The material gave me a greater knowledge and appreciation of MapServer in particular allowing me to move onto more in depth books quickly.

Good primer for the novice - 2009-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
If you think you want to dabble in open source geospatial Web Services, this is a good book to learn about the fundamentals. I would have liked to see more coverage of OGC standards.

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