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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful to understand general concept...flawed code, December 22, 2010
This review is from: Map Scripting 101: An Example-Driven Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps (Paperback)
I've gone over different aspects of this book a few times now, and was really looking forward to it showing a few things with ease, that I was looking to complete for a site I'm working on. Needless to say, I'm rather disappointed with the code issues within the book. I've compared the code in the book itself to the code on both the books website and the code on the Mapstraction website, and it varies much from both. So much so that it doesn't even work correctly...I believe that it's partially due to the lack of clarity on the Mapstraction website. The book does excel in describing techniques used for map scripting without a reliance on any one particular service, but after the issues described above, I feel that sticking to one service (such as google maps) would make your life a lot easier.
Pros
- Good read for basic concepts
- Easy to read and understand
Cons
- Flawed code and examples
- Book site code doesn't always match books code
(site code appears to be outdated! How this is possible I don't know)
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timely, practical and fun, August 25, 2010
This review is from: Map Scripting 101: An Example-Driven Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps (Paperback)
This book couldn't have come at a better time: everything to do with mapping and location awareness is just hitting the mainstream, from NASA cartography to geotagged tweets. If you want practical tools for putting this enormous flood of data to use on the web, this is by far the best starting point, and an excellent reference guide to boot.
Honestly, when I first opened it, I wasn't that interested. I'm a web guy with a chronic interest in mapping, and I figured anything with "101" in the title was beneath me. But after a few chapters to bring beginners up to speed, it was introducing stuff I'd never thought of, and by the end there are ideas that you could easily turn into the basis for a major site. That's pretty amazing for a book that assumes no previous knowledge of the topic.
(In fact, now that I think about it, if someone told me they didn't know where to get started with web development, I would point them to this book among others. The practical projects would make it much more rewarding than the usual "now let's turn the <div> blue"-type JavaScript guides.)
It's also just plain fun to read. DuVander's writing style is warm and engaging without talking down to the reader, and most of the example projects are interesting in themselves, even if you're only using them as exercises.
If you want to work with maps on the web, this is easily the best all-around resource.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Painless, nay, *enjoyable* guide to building online maps, August 20, 2010
This review is from: Map Scripting 101: An Example-Driven Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps (Paperback)
I know enough about the web to not call it the "Internets," but beyond that I know next to nothing about programming, coding, Java... the list goes on. I began reading this book after struggling to set up my first website and I think that DuVander has done something that I didn't know was possible: he's created an approachable guide to creating complex online maps for readers of any experience level--even me.
The hardest thing for someone like me to do was crack open the book. Once I had, the author captured me with his conversational style. He's written Map Scripting 101 almost like a workbook: you learn through doing something small, then adding a bit more to it, and a bit more... and before long, you have mastered something surprising in its complexity. And maybe most surprising at all: none of it was the least bit painful.
Recommended.
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