Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax, by Michael Purvis, Jeffrey Sambells, and Cameron Turner; publ. by Apress 2006

Despite the age and over-hyped front cover, this is a good getting-started book for Google Maps development that goes beyond the usual JavaScript examples.

My bookshelf has a growing number of the yellow and black Apress books. Generally they are good books, although this one has a front cover that oozes hype. As well as the buzzword compliant title featuring PHP and Ajax, it is also sub-titled "Build awesome web-based mapping applications with this pwerful API!". The common misuse of the word 'awesome' always reminds me of an Eddie Izzard sketch suggesting that the word should be reserved for things that are truly awesome - eg. a Moon landing, and not something like a hotdog. Sorry, Google, but a Google Maps application can be impressive but it is never going to be awesome.

At least the other buzzwords (PHP and Ajax) get a mention in the book, although not really enough to warrant a mention in the title. Most of the Ajax content covers the API's Ajax features (e.g. feeding JSON pushpin data). PHP also gets some coverage in examples that extract data from a database. In fact, the authors could have added MySQL to the title as this gets almost as much coverage as PHP.

At least the cover's "From Novice to Professional" is not quite such an exaggeration. Yes it would be impressive if this was true for 300 or so pages of book, regardless of the subject. However, it is true that the book's first custom map is technologically very simple (a short KML file fed through a URL parameter). The book also has good coverage of different Google Maps programming techniques and does not dwell too much on the simple JavaScript examples that are usually seen. For example, it covers third party geocoders, interactions with databases, CSS styling, "please wait" warnings, large datasets, and even TIGER/Line data.

Appendices cover potential data sources, and a reference to the Google Maps API. Of course, both appendices will become dated very quickly, and the API reference does not make the mistake of giving too much detail that will quickly become useless. Instead it serves as a reference to find what classes and methods are available. You should refer to the online reference documentation for full coverage.

So, despite a hyped front cover, the book provides a good introduction to more sophisticated Google Maps programming techniques.