Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
With the help of the Internet and accompanying tools, creating and publishing online maps has become easier and rich with options. A city guide web site can use maps to show the location of restaurants, museums, and art venues. A business can post a map for reaching its offices. The state government can present a map showing average income by area. Developers who want to publish maps on the web often discover that commercial tools cost too much and hunting down the free tools scattered across Internet can use up too much of your time and resources. Web Mapping Illustrated shows you how to create maps, even interactive maps, with free tools, including MapServer, OpenEV, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. It also explains how to find, collect, understand, use, and share mapping data, both over the traditional Web and using OGC-standard services like WFS and WMS. Mapping is a growing field that goes beyond collecting and analyzing GIS data. Web Mapping Illustrated shows how to combine free geographic data, GPS, and data management tools into one resource for your mapping information needs so you don't have to lose your way while searching for it. Remember the fun you had exploring the world with maps? Experience the fun again with Web Mapping Illustrated. This book will take you on a direct route to creating valuable maps.

Rating : - Good overview of web mapping
This book is readable, nice to look at, and does a good job of pulling a lot of information into one place. Finding information about the different GIS packages in the web is a challenge. If you don't know GIS already, like me, you're lost. This book helped me find my bearings, and in no time I was able to take shapefiles, do processing on them, and display the results in a web page dynamically.
The problem with this book is that it's fairly shallow. It will give you a couple of basic examples of how to use some pieces of software, but for anything more complicated, you have to look elsewhere. There is frustratingly little information on mapscript, but, overall, I'd say the book fulfills its role.