Reference Books

[percy]

I taught a course on open source web mapping last term at portland state 
university and I had a hard time deciding between the two books.

Tyler's is great because it covers such a huge swath of territory. 
Kropla's is good because it has such a reference book approach. I ended 
up recommending that students buy BOTH, but if they had to choose one to 
get Web Mapping Illustrated.

my $0.02
percy

Tim Bowden wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 15:17 -0600, Matt Pettis wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>  
>> I bought Beginning MapServer - Open Source GIS Development (Bill
>> Kropla, ISBN 1-59059-490-8).  I liked its strucutre and examples.  It
>> starts with a chapter on how to build it (on Linux systems), gives a
>> very simple mapfile example, and then does a very complex mapping
>> example, which it redoes it in the different mapscript languages (php,
>> python, and perl... includes the mapscript and web code it uses) --
>> the redundancy of which is pretty helpful.  It also addresses how to
>> do map queries, which looks good, but i haven't used yet, so I'm not
>> so familiar, and different utility programs for map data.  It includes
>> a mapfile reference in the appendix.
>>  
>> In short, I like it, and refer to it when working on my web mapping
>> application.
>>  
>> Web Mapping Illustrated (OReilly, I forget the author) is a great book
>> on maptools, and has a good deal on mapserver, but also covers other
>> open source mapping tools.  If you are looking for something focused
>> on mapserver itself, however, I recommend the Kropla book.
>>  
>> hope this helps,
>> matt
>>
>>     
>
> Web Mapping Illustrated- Author is Tyler Mitchel, who is now the
> Executive Director of OSGeo.  I've got it and I've found it very useful.
> I haven't see Bill Kropla's book so I can't make a comparison, but I'm
> happy with Tylers book.
>
> HTH,
> Tim Bowden
>
>   

-- 
David Percy
Geospatial Data Manager
Geology Department
Portland State University
http://gisgeek.pdx.edu
503-725-3373