OpenLayers Cookbook

Packt Publishing has recently announced the publication of OpenLayers Cookbook, my first work as a technical book author.

OpenLayers is one of the most complete and powerful open source JavaScript libraries for displaying map data in web browsers, providing an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps.

The book provides 60 practical examples to understand the main topics to create web mapping applications based on OpenLayers. It is for GIS-related professionals who have basic knowledge of web technologies, and wish to start or gain in-depth knowledge of creating web mapping applications.

The book covers the main concepts about maps, layers, controls, protocols, events, important tile providers and WMS servers and is divided in the next set of chapters:

• Chapter 1: Web Mapping Basics_
• Chapter 2: Adding Raster Layers_
• Chapter 3: Working with Vector Layers_
• Chapter 4: Working with Events_
• Chapter 5: Adding Controls_
• Chapter 6: Theming_
• Chapter 7: Styling Features_
• Chapter 8: Beyond the Basics_

The chapter organization tries to follow the natural set of step required to learn OpenLayers from the beginning. Chapter 1 introduces the map related concepts, how it contains layers and how they can be handled. Chapters 2 and 3 shows how to work with the two kinds of layers: raster and vector. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the importance of events in web applications, the mechanism offered by OpenLayers and the main set of controls the framework implements. The chapters 6 and 7 are centered on changing the look and feel of our maps in addition to improve the look of vector features. Finally, the chapter 8 show some advanced concepts on how we can extend OpenLayers.

The process of writing a book is really complex and in addition to the author (that is me) many other people are related to it. By this reason, I would like to thank to the people at Packt Publishing: Usha Iyer, Kedar Bhat, Joel Goveya, Joyslita Dsouza and Madhuri Das (sorry if I miss someone), to my awesome reviewers: David Burgoon, Mohammad Motamedi (thanks Mohammad for your great review), Jorge Sanz, Srinivas Shanmugam, Davor Zelic and Richard Zijlstra, to my own folks who always encourage me and, most important, to my wife who suffers my addiction to computer science.

Finally, thanks to all the readers of the book. I hope the book was what they expect from it.

No doubt to write here asking for help. Thanks to all !!!

Other materials

Book is accompanied by a RIA application (implemented with the Dojo Toolkit) allowing to run and show all the recipes of the book. It is freely available at my Openlayers-Cookbook GitHub repository. You can see the application in action online. Fell free to contribute.

Additionally, I have a presentation summarizing the main concepts of OpenLayers at the repository OpenLayers-Presentation and can be seen also online at OpenLayers online presentation.

Reviews

What others say about the book:

1st Book Review : OpenLayers Cookbook
Reviews at Amazon.com
OpenLayers Cookbook review
Book Review: OpenLayers Cookbook
OpenLayers Cookbook