Beginning Google Maps API 3 (eBook)

This book is about the next generation of the Google Maps API. It will provide the reader with the skills and knowledge necessary to incorporate Google Maps version 3 on web pages in both desktop and mobile browsers.

It also describes how to deal with common problems that most map developers encounter at some point, like performance and usability issues with having too many markers and possible solutions to that.

• Introduction to the Google Maps API version 3
• Solutions to common problems most developers encounters (too many markers, common JavaScript pitfalls)
• Best practices using HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Google Maps

Gabriel Svennerberg is a usability-oriented web developer from Sweden. He's been working in the web industry for over a decade and is known in the web developer community for evangelizing usability and web standards. He's also known for spreading knowledge about the Google Maps API through his website, In Usability We Trust, which also features articles about usability and other things related to web development. It s found at www.svennerberg.com. At his current job at Saab Security and Defence Solutions (www.saabgroup.com), Gabriel is busy designing and building web applications for situation awareness and crisis management. These applications always incorporate maps in some way and the Google Maps API is one of the map solutions being used. Gabriel lives in V xj , Sweden with his fianc e, Petronella, and their son, Ludvig.

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About the Technical Reviewer ? Rob Drimmie is a software developer with a bias toward web-based applications. The best things about him are his wife and children. He likes pho and hamburgers but has never eaten both at the same sitting. xiv ? INTRODUCTION Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to thank my beloved fiancee, Petronella Frisk, for putting up with me spending evenings and weekends writing this book. Thank you for your patience and support! I couldn't have done it without you! Many thanks to Tom Skinner for helping me with the initial reviews of the chapters and with testing the examples. Your help has been immensly valuable to me. If not for you, the book would have been a lot poorer. I would also like to thank you for your words of encouragement at the times when I needed it the most. Also thanks to Charlie Irish, who helped proofread Chapter 5, before I used it as a beta chapter. My former college Chris Jangelov has been a source of inspiration over the years. I probably owe it to him that I entered into the world of web standards, usability, and blogging in the first place. Thank you, Chris, for always having new ideas and being encouraging.