Customer Reviews

Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was worried when I ordered this book that it would just be a reference book of the Google Maps API, but thankfully I was wrong. This book is an excellent reference to anyone wanting to build a Google Maps enabled Rails Application.

The first four chapters take you through building an application, similar to the author's hotspotr application where a user can save Wifi hotspot information. For many people this may be all they are looking for, a way to create maps, save information and geocode addresses.

Chapters 5-8 deal with larger datasets and the example they use is from the FCC Antenna Structure Registration, which has 120k records already geocoded for you. It then takes you through different presentation methods. If you want to see the output, go to book dot earthcode dot com chapter seven, server custom tiles. It's a very impressive result, similar to the pictures of earth at night.

The rest of the book gives other advanced uses and apis, I have not read all the way through that but it looks interesting. The other thing I like about the tone of the book is the conversational style. For example in Chapter 5 where they are using the FCC dataset they talk about the advantages of using a mysql import instead of going through the ActiveRecord layer, resulting in importing the data in less than a minute compared to 1.5 hours with ActiveRecord. This is the type of information that usually only comes from time spent trying different methods, so it's nice for us to be able to leverage their hard work.

In general I have been impressed with the Apress books ( no pun intended) them and Pragmatic Programmers have really started giving O'Reilly a run for their money.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in using Google Maps with Ruby on Rails. My expectations were exceeded and I believe it lives up to its sub-title "From Novice to Professional".

I develop Rails applications and became interested in Google Maps in conjunction with a Real Estate application I was working on. In particular, I was interested using Google Maps for visual analysis of large data sets. Knowing next to nothing about the Google Maps API, I was truly at the Novice level. The book started off at the basics and quickly built on example and technique to the point where there was a working example of a problem similar in scope to mine. Along the way, the trade offs and techniques were well presented and explained in detail. Not only did I gain the knowledge and confidence to tackle my particular problem, but I was also inspired by all the other potential applications of this exciting new technology.

This book was well organized and written. I was obvious that the authors had worked through the examples and I especially appreciated many of the best practices and hints they gave. Chapter 7 "Optimizing and Scaling for Large Data Sets" was particularly interesting for me and my application. It included code and examples for several server-side and client-side techniques and as well as a clear explanation of their uses and trade offs.

If you are a Rails coder and you want to master Google Maps, this is a must have book

I wouldn't recommend getting this book if you're trying to implement Google Maps on Rails. It is outdated if you are using Rails 3 and the Google maps API v3. I also didn't think the steps they have to chapter by chapter was structured very well - I prefer a more guided approach because I am relatively new to rails and javascript and there were a lot of places where it was easy to get stuck.

If you are trying to implement google maps on rails, I'd recommend maybe getting the Apress book on the GMaps API v3, and then just relying on Google/Stack Overflow to figure out how to integrate it into Rails. There doesn't seem to be any good books that provide this at the moment.

I bought this book as I was learning ruby on rails (I had no experience at all when I bought it). I built a website using the material in the book within a few weeks during my spare time. [...] I think I've read every page in this book twice, its goto book for almost anything dealing with rails and google maps. One note, a few things have changed in the rails language, so make sure to download the errata of the code on the website. Just google the name of the book to find it.

This item is an excellent start point to developers who want to learn how to use Google Maps API within Rails. Helped a lot to increase productivity with the basic skills.

A good guide if you are new to google maps. If you are an experienced google maps developer trying to integrate RJS or other cool rails techniques, this book is not very useful. I'm coding rails and google maps applications daily and I haven't picked this book up more than twice since receiving it.

I was a little disappointed. Although there are a few interesting tips, I did not think the book was very well edited. There are several typos. For example, one obvious mistake in chapter two, which for a novice, would make the code unusable. array.size should be array.length. Furthermore in chapter three, the authors abandon the completed code listings altogether leaving the novice totally stranded. In addition, the online code is also incomplete and quite broken. I would not recommend this book unless you are already an expert and can filter through the errors and omissions.