Title: Web Mapping Illustrated
Author: Tyler Mitchell
Publisher: O'Reilly Media Inc.
ISBN: 0-596-00865-1
Reviewer: Gordon Haverland
Pages: 336

Publisher's Description: 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.

TOC:
1. Introduction to Digital Mapping
2. Digital Mapping Tasks and Tools
3. Converting and Viewing Maps
4. Installing MapServer
5. Acquiring Map Data
6. Analyzing Map Data
7. Converting Map Data
8. Visualizing Mapping Data in a Desktop Program
9. Create and Edit Personal Map Data
10. Creating Static Maps
11. Publishing Interactive Maps on the Web
12. Accessing Maps Through Web Services
13. Managing a Spatial Database
14. Custom Programming with MapServer's MapScript
A. A Brief Introduction to Map Projections
B. MapServer Reference Guide for Vector Data Access

Reviewer Background: My background in large part is that of a GIS/GPS
specialist in Ag-Geostatistics for 6 years.

Content Type: This book is intended towards people who are, or may be,
providing map driven content, or content which is mostly map driven. The
focus is on Open Source solutions, such as the Geospatial Data Abstraction
Library (GDAL) with OGR, OpenEV, the U of Mn MapServer, PostGIS, etc.

Content Level: This book is intended for people who understand web
programming and are working on map oriented applications, or managers of
those kind of people.

Features: One chapter provides URLs to reasonable sources of map data.

Style: Standard computing oriented textbook.

This is not a book on how to make great maps (on the web, or anywhere).
Making great maps is difficult.

Making/using usable maps via the web is that this book is about.

Combining different map formats is one area looked at in detail, as is
analysis of metadata.

This is a good book for those involved in building websites which are
involved in making maps as part of their normal operation.