Customer Reviews

Beginning MapServer: Open Source GIS Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

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I purchased this book to help with developing a simple map-enabled web page running on a Windows computer. The book proved very difficult to use in that context. If you are planning on working on a windows computer, you should be aware of some potential shortcomings.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have considerable GIS experience, but little experience with web development.

The book assumes that you are operating not only on a UNIX-based platform, but also that you will operate in a particular "development environment". The author does provide full instructions for building that development environment on a Unix machine, so if you are starting from scratch, everything will work as described.

However....

You can not readily build the same "development environment" on a Windows computer. I installed a version of MS4W ("Mapserver 4 Windows" on my computer. MS4W is a labor saving package that rapidly sets up a web server and installs most of the other open source software one would like to have available for using Mapsource effectively. Unfortunately, the installation differs from the "development environment" assumed by the book.

As a result, there are MANY small but significant differences that crop up in developing the example applications given in the book. Many of these are simply differences in the way files are named or in the structure of the directory tree, but they are annoying and difficult to track down. it took me several DAYS of work and repeated searches for help on on-line MAPSERVER forums to figure things out and get the first several example applications running. I still have not managed to get about half of the examples up and running.

That said, the book offers a nice introduction to many of the central concepts used in Mapserver. It has a good reference section that allows you to look up Mapserver commands, etc.

Ultimately, I was able to develop the simple web-based applications I was after. This book contributed to that, but only after considerable frustration. Several Mapserver tutorials are available on-line. Some are specifically geared to Windows-based systems. They certainly offer a less tortuous, if sometimes less complete, path to getting Mapserver working on a Windows-based system.

The book is written in a very clear way and goes to the point explaining mapserver thru examples, it should be a reference book for those, that are starting with mapserver, but it lacks a proper cover of raster layers and WCS. Interresting is that the prefered database used, is not PosGIS but MySQL (normally MySQL is pushed aside by PostGIS in spatial databases projects) this was a pleasent surprise, since I normally use MySQL. Conclusion: get the book

The version of the code sofware change very quickly... the book is old, but is full of content.

Best guide I've seen on mapserver. Does a fine job of getting a new user going. Could use more trouble shooting.

This is an excellent hardcopy reference to MapServer, As others have noted, it is five years out of date, which can be confusing. For instance, a map document now requires an explicit MAP block containing the entire data and security fixes have broken some of the reference paths. Setting up the server is not covered in depth, and translating the examples to the MS4W world again can be confusing for the neophyte.

I've had this book for about a week, and so far my experience has been that not a single example works out of the box with the current version of mapscript.

The worse news, is that most of the documentation on the mapscript website is totally out of date as well.

If revised, then this book would be great, but it isn't just the book.

The are some incongruities between mapscript itself and the API libs in other languages that suggest that the current development environment for mapserver is sufficiently busted, to invite taking a hard look at much more complex map engines.

In a nutshell, I went with mapserver, because it support GDAL, Perl, and appeared to be well documented.

It isn't well documented, the Perl API isn't servicable in the current version, and I haven't tested GDAL yet.

Good Luck

Beginning MapServer should not be your only source of information on using MapServer. The book has a lot of usefull examples in it, but I am missing something. My main interest is on how to use MapServer through PHP /MapScript. In particlar I would like to know more on the bindings from PHP/MapScript to the object model in MapServer.

Do not expect the book to cover it all. It tries, but doesen't quite make it.

Still - buy it! You need it for your library, I am sure you do ;-)