OpenLayers Cookbook

I'm near to finish my first experience as the author of a technical book. Titled OpenLayers Cookbook it has been written for PacktPublishing editorial, while the OpenLayers version 2.11 was the stable release.

It follows the PacktPublishing specifications of what they understand a cookbook must be: practical.

The cookbook must be also limited to over 300 pages, but I can't control myself and finally I have written more than 400 pages :) Hopefully I have permission from PacktPublishing to publish some of the book chapters in my blog. So I will try to get some time and write some of the forgotten recipes here for you.

If you are a GIS-related professional with some basic knowledge of web technologies and want to start or gain in-depth knowledge of creating web mapping applications, this book is written for you.

The book

I like to consider the book an intermediate book where the reader can understand the basic concepts of a web mapping application and learn all the basic usages of OpenLayers:

• Create maps, understand projection and other important properties
• Add raster and vector layers
• Work with important tile providers
• Work with OGCs WMS and WFS compliant servers
• Read/write features from/to different data sources
• Style features to improve their visualisation
• Understand events and work with the main controls

I have created the chapters in the appropriate order required to learn OpenLayers in a natural way and, for each chapter, I have written a set or recipes that shows the main and more common things required in a day to day job.

The writing

It has been a hard task to me to write this book. Think on the appropriate recipes, introduce concepts and code the samples takes me more time than I consider initially.

As many other libraries, OpenLayers has plenty of classes with lots of properties and methods, so create specific recipes to show their usage and utility was not an easy task. Fortunately I count with a great team of professionals from PacktPublishing and a great group of reviewers ;)

I can say by my experience writing a book, without to be a best seller author, is a purely vocational tasks. Hope I can repeat the experience.