Want to find every pizza place within a 15-mile radius? Where the dog parks are in a new town? The most central meeting place for your class, club or group of friends? The cheapest gas stations on a day-to-day basis? The location of convicted sex offenders in an area to which you may be considering moving? The applications, serendipitous and serious, seem to be infinite, as developers find ever more creative ways to add to and customize the satellite images and underlying API of Google Maps. Written by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, authors of the popular Mapping Hacks, Google Maps Hacks shares dozens of tricks for combining the capabilities of Google Maps with your own datasets. Such diverse information as apartment listings, crime reporting or flight routes can be integrated with Google's satellite imagery in creative ways, to yield new and useful applications. The authors begin with a complete introduction to the "standard" features of Google Maps. The adventure continues with 60 useful and interesting mapping projects that demonstrate ways developers have added their own features to the maps. After that's given you ideas of your own, you learn to apply the techniques and tools to add your own data to customize and manipulate Google Maps. Even Google seems to be tacitly blessing what might be seen as unauthorized use, but maybe they just know a good thing when they see one. With the tricks and techniques you'll learn from Google Maps Hacks, you'll be able to adapt Google's satellite map feature to create interactive maps for personal and commercial applications for businesses ranging from real estate to package delivery to home services, transportation and more. Includes a foreword by Google Maps tech leads, Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

500 pages of jaw-dropping hacks, mods and customizations, including creating mashups with data from other sources such as Flickr, building a space station tracker, and hacking Maps with Firefox PiggyBank. This work shows readers how to find any golf course in the world, hack maps with statistical data, build interactive maps, and more.

An insider account of the security holes that left Google Maps exposed Hacking and Exposing Google Mapsis the story of Bryan Seely, the well-known ethical hacker who discovered the vulnerabilities in Google Maps. Written by Bryan himself, this detailed story draws from his firsthand experience to define all the parties involved, outline the background information, lay out the timeline of events, and explain the technical solutions that sew up the holes in Google Maps. Engaging and revealing, this book provides expert insight into the vulnerabilities and hacks that could affect other map directories like Yelp, Bing, and Apple Maps. Bryan discusses his struggles in convincing the Secret Service, FBI, and Google of the threat, and divulges the shocking details of how criminals have forged a stronghold in Google Maps and other directories by means of mail fraud, wire fraud, and more. Google Maps for mobile is one of the most popular mobile apps, but security has become a growing concern, with the satellite imagery offering potential terrorists a valuable tool for choosing targets and planning attacks. This book describes the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit, from the man who was the first to discover them in the Google Maps directory. Understand Google Maps' critical vulnerabilities Discover who is taking advantage of the situation Learn how victims are fighting back Explore the technical fixes that lock it down tight Data security is increasingly on everyone's mind, and this book tells a riveting, real-life tale of what happens when it goes wrong on a massive scale. Hacking and Exposing Google Maps is a witty, absorbing, informative story and cautionary tale, with in-depth technical know-how for preventing future attacks.

Want to find every pizza place within a 15-mile radius? Where the dog parks are in a new town? The most central meeting place for your class, club or group of friends? The cheapest gas stations on a day-to-day basis? The location of convicted sex offenders in an area to which you may be considering moving? The applications, serendipitous and serious, seem to be infinite, as developers find ever more creative ways to add to and customize the satellite images and underlying API of Google Maps.

Google Maps makes Web-based mapping fun, and opens up an incredible variety of opportunities for developers. This resource shows developers how to add their own functionality to Google Maps.

Everyone knows that Google lets you search billions of web pages. But few people realize that Google also gives you hundreds of cool ways to organize and play with information. Since we released the last edition of this bestselling book, Google has added many new features and services to its expanding universe: Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Blog Search, Video Search, Music Search, Google Base, Google Reader, and Google Desktop among them. We've found ways to get these new services to do even more. The expanded third edition of Google Hacks is a brand-new and infinitely more useful book for this powerful search engine. You'll not only find dozens of hacks for the new Google services, but plenty of updated tips, tricks and scripts for hacking the old ones. Now you can make a Google Earth movie, visualize your web site traffic with Google Analytics, post pictures to your blog with Picasa, or access Gmail in your favorite email client. Industrial strength and real-world tested, this new collection enables you to mine a ton of information within Google's reach. And have a lot of fun while doing it: Search Google over IM with a Google Talk bot Build a customized Google Map and add it to your own web site Cover your searching tracks and take back your browsing privacy Turn any Google query into an RSS feed that you can monitor in Google Reader or the newsreader of your choice Keep tabs on blogs in new, useful ways Turn Gmail into an external hard drive for Windows, Mac, or Linux Beef up your web pages with search, ads, news feeds, and more Program Google with the Google API and language of your choice For those of you concerned about Google as an emerging Big Brother, this new edition also offers advice and concrete tips for protecting your privacy. Get into the world of Google and bend it to your will!

Ajax, the popular term for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is one of the most important combinations of technologies for web developers to know these days. With its rich grouping of technologies, Ajax developers can create interactive web applications with XML-based web services, using JavaScript in the browser to process the web server response. Taking complete advantage of Ajax, however, requires something more than your typical "how-to" book. What it calls for is Ajax Hacks from O'Reilly. This valuable guide provides direct, hands-on solutions that take the mystery out of Ajax's many capabilities. Each hack represents a clever way to accomplish a specific task, saving you countless hours of searching for the right answer. A smart collection of 80 insider tips and tricks, Ajax Hacks covers all of the technology's finer points. Want to build next-generation web applications today? This book can show you how. Among the multitude of topics addressed, it shows you techniques for: Using Ajax with Google Maps and Yahoo Maps Displaying Weather.com data Scraping stock quotes Fetching postal codes Building web forms with auto-complete functionality Ajax Hacks also features a number of advanced hacks for accelerated web developers. Discover how to create huge, maintainable bookmarklets, how to use client-side storage for Ajax applications, and how to call a built-in Java object from JavaScript using Ajax. The book even addresses best practices for testing Ajax applications and improving maintenance, performance, and reliability for JavaScript code. The latest in O"Reilly's celebrated Hacks series, Ajax Hacks smartly complements other O'Reilly titles such as Head Rush Ajax and JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.