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.
