Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
There is a hidden revolution going on: geography is moving from niche to the mainstream. News reports routinely include maps and satellite images. More and more pieces of equipment cell phones, cars, computers now contain Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. Many of the major database vendors have made geographic data types standard in their flagship products.

GIS for Web Developers introduces Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in simple terms and demonstrates hands-on uses. With this book, you'll explore popular websites like maps.google.com, see the technologies they use, and learn how to create your own. Written with the usual Pragmatic Bookshelf humor and real-world experience, GIS for Web Developers makes geographic programming concepts accessible to the common developer.

This book will demystify GIS and show you how to make GIS work for you. You'll learn the buzzwords and explore ways to geographically-enable your own applications. GIS is not a fundamentally difficult domain, but there is a barrier to entry because of the industry jargon. This book will show you how to "walk the walk" and "talk the talk" of a geographer.

You'll learn how to find the vast amounts of free geographic data that's out there and how to bring it all together. Although this data is free, it's scattered across the web on a variety of different sites, in a variety of incompatible formats. You'll see how to convert it among several popular formats including plain text, ESRI Shapefiles, and Geography Markup Language (GML).

With this book in hand, you'll become a real geographic programmer using the Java programming language. You'll find plenty of working code examples in Java using some of the many GIS-oriented applications and APIs. You'll be able to:

Rating : - A very good bock
I was not familiar with GIS system and I got this book to figure out how things work. The book turned out to be a great help for me. Since everything was very new to me I ended up spending a lot of time to learn about the PostGres database, it PostGIS extention and Geoserver. So do not take it as a complete walk through tutorial but it certainly great help when you get stock somewhere. Bear in mind that I am quiet computer savvy and familiar with linux, java and such. Overall, I recommend this book if you are a web developer that wants to deal with spatial data and his needs are beyond things that can be done simply on google Map, yahoo map and such.