internet applications

I really enjoyed reading this book. I provides an excellent overview of location sensitive technologies and services. I particularly liked Chapter 10 ("Pulling it all together"), which provides practical advice on how to build new applications. The chapter on privacy was also extremely useful. I highly recommend this book.

This is the first book I have found that ties together positioning, geocoding, and the user interface. The author has done a tremendous job of being comprehensive, covering everything I could think about. The field varies from the arcane to the mundane, and there are a lot of threads to be tied together - and he manages to do so very well. He does say it is not a programmers cookbook, and I did not expect one. But he has done a guidebook to an industry that seems very fragmented - with this book, you get a good grip about what is fragmented and what is already standardized. The author really penetrates deep into the concepts, drilling down into position-service APIs, geocoding languages, and privacy aspects. Sometimes, he even manages to make the stuff funny, and it is readable all the time. There are a lot of tricky things here, and as a developer, you had better have a clue about which traps there are to avoid. So far, cost seems to be the biggest problem for deployment - GPS is too [costly], mobile phone networks do not offer this as a service (which they could, and this is very well covered in the book).
It is a five-star in my view.

This guy really took on a big area - and you get the impression it is still very much an area being worked on. There seems to be a lot of hot air and very proprietary solutions in the field, but not in the book. He concentrates on standards, since he like me realizes that the proprietary standards will not go anywhere. None of them can become big enough.

He talks about positioning systems, APIs, how to add geocodes using the Geographic Markup Language - really useful. The only things I missed were some more examples from real services. But he does say that since many use text messages phones, and almost all interfaces are proprietary, it is hard to talk about without being extremely specific. There could be more about how to use GPS on PDAs, though, but I guess there are not actually that many services out there.

The book really digs down into the subject (there is even a chapter on privacy), and I found it extremely useful. Lots of stuff there I did not know before. There could be more software on the CD, although there are pointers to lots of it. So I got it anyway. Good buy.