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...

The Google Maps API remains one of the showcase examples of the Web 2.0 development paradigm. Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional is the first book to comprehensively introduce the service from a developer perspective, showing you how you can integrate mapping features into your Rails-driven web applications. Proceeding far beyond simplistic map display, youll learn how to draw from a variety of data sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data and Google's own geocoding feature to build comprehensive geocoding services for...