HTML5 Geolocation: Bringing Location to Web Applications

by Anthony T. Holdener, Anthony T. Holdener

Truly now you can write geolocation applications directly in the browser, rather than develop native apps for particular devices. This concise book demonstrates the W3C Geolocation API in action, with code and examples to help you build HTML5 apps using the "write once, deploy everywhere" model. Along the way, you get a crash course in geolocation, browser support, and ways to integrate the API with common geo tools like Google Maps. Ideal for experienced JavaScript developers.

116 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2011

Reviews

[Khaled Alhourani · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book begins it's introduction with a breif about W3C Geolocation API, and the history of location techniques from B.C. till now, and how they evolved through centuries. There are plenty of good info & defintions inside the first chapter. The author also mentioned the current techniques for location detection (GPS, IP, GSM, etc...). He also mentioned many location & Location Based Services (LBS), social applications, and tools (Yelp, Gowalla, Foursquare). Next chapter describes many fundemental keywords like coordinates, map projections systems (e.g. WGS84), accuracy, etc..

In Chapter 3 comes the real stuff for programmers, the code, the author introduced the some of the available libraries out there and the compatibility of each library with browsers, browsers versions, and mobile platforms, and with each library a small code snippit. Some code snippits are so short so you have to figure it out youself, and other are very well explained before and after the snippit. He then describes the W3C Geolocation API (navigator.geolocation), and it's methods. Firebug here will help you a lot to explore the navigator.geolocation object and
it's methods and attributes.

Chapter 4 describes how to use the geocode with different mapping services. One negative point here is that the author didn't clearly mention the differences between these mapping services. He just mentioned how to use them as code snippit and screenshot of the resulted code. Also he just described three mapping services, while there are other popular ones that as I think he can mention breifly, for example he didn't mention the opensource (both big and small) solutions out there (e.g. TileMill).

The next chapter (#5) talks about storing the Geographic data.

The last chapter gives some examples of what can you do with geolocation, what applications you can build, and things you can acheive.

You can preview the book & it's content on Safari Books Online:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/...

Also here is a link that list many things discussed in the book:
http://diveintohtml5.org/geolocation....

I recommend this book for everyone wants to learn more or just learn the basics of geolocations and locations techniques. It's one of the few books I read in one day, because of it's organized way of introducing the information, the code snippits, and the direct information without a lot of bla-bla. If you have worked a lot with Geolocation, then this book is not for you.

[Jrdn Element]

asdasd