The Google Maps API remains one of the showcase examples of the Web 2.0 development paradigm, making it fairly trivial for third-party developers to incorporate dynamic mapping services into Web applications. In fact, interest in the Google service is so strong that it arguably sparked the mashup phenomenon, along with a number of websites such as http://www.gmapsmania.com intended to highlight some of the exciting applications developers are building using the mapping API in conjunction with a variety of other data sources.
Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax is the first book to comprehensively introduce the service from a developer-perspective, showing readers how they can integrate mapping features into their Rails-driven Web applications.
Proceeding far beyond simplistic map display, readers are shown how to draw upon a variety of data sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line data and Google's own geocoding feature to build comprehensive geocoding services for mapping many locations around the world.
Readers are also guided through various examples demonstrating how to encourage user interaction such as pinpointing map locations, adding comments, and building community-driven maps.
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