The Google Maps API remains one of the showcase examples of the Web 2.0 development paradigm. Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional is the first book to comprehensively introduce the service from a developer perspective, showing you how you can integrate mapping features into your Rails-driven web applications. Proceeding far beyond simplistic map display, you'll learn how to draw from a variety of data sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data and Google's own geocoding feature to build comprehensive geocoding services for mapping many locations around the world. The book also steers you through various examples that show how to encourage user interaction such as through pinpointing map locations, adding comments, and building community-driven maps.

As a web designer or developer, you know how powerful DOM scripting is for enhancing web pages and applications, adding dynamic functionality and improving the user experience. You've got a reasonable understanding of JavaScript and the DOM, but now you want to take your skills further. This book is all you need to do so it shows you how to add essential functionality to your web pages, such as on the fly layout and style changes, interface personalization, maps and search using APIs, visual effects using JavaScript libraries, and much more. * Includes a quick recap of the basics, for reference purposes. * Packed with real world JavaScript solutions from beginning to end * Written by Beginning Google Maps author Jeffrey Sambells, and includes a case study by JavaScript guru Aaron Gustafson. What you'll learn * A quick recap of the HTML and CSS DOM, methods, and events. * Shows you the basics of how to add dynamic effects and respond to user actions to your web sites using CSS and JavaScript. * Introduces Ajax to the mix, showing you how to use it, and when not to use it.*Learn best practices (such as graceful degredation) and productivity improvement via code reuse (libraries and APIs) * Create Mashups using search, photo and mapping APIs. * Build better, more dynamic user experiences using libraries such as Prototype and Scriptaculous.