I've been reading Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic Cartography for a while now and have been meaning to post a review about this book.
It's an O'Reilly book, so of course, they have a great website with free chapters and sample hacks: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mappinghks/chapter/
The authors, Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh offer 100 mapping hacks and have organized the book into nine chapters called Mapping Your Life, Mapping Your Neighborhood, Mapping Your World, Mapping (on) the Web, Mapping with Gadgets, Mapping on Your Desktop, Names and Places, Building the Geospatial Web, and Mapping with Other People.
I really liked this quote in the preface and find that it's spot-on:
"Geospatial, or locative, literacy might be described as the ability to understand, create, and use spatial information and maps in navigating, in describing phenomena, in problem-solving, and in artistic expression -- ultimately including the ability to create and utilize information, viewable in place, directly associated with physical reality. There are no programs to help people develop this kind of literacy, and even in the most developed countries, those who have achieved a high level of geospatial literacy have done so without a compelling formal curriculum."
The book is a good resource to increase your geospatial knowledge by doing, not simply reading. The hacks range from very simple mapping hacks to more complex hacks that require specialized software and coding to reproduce.
The authors also have a website for the book and offer a lot more mapping hacks: http://mappinghacks.com/
A friend of mine who is a GIS Programmer at ESRI Canada had pre-ordered the book, but this was near the same time that Google Maps Beta had just come out and she canceled the order. I didn't cancel my order because I thought there would be some pretty good mapping code tricks that would still be relevant.
The book is heavily geared towards the U.S. market with a lot of U.S. - based links, there were some hacks that worked just as well for Canada. There are also a lot of hacks that use MapQuest, which in my opinion, seems really, really old since I was using Yahoo Maps and telling all my friends to use it, even before Google Maps came along. But, as the preface states, they worked on this book for quite a while with a lot of revisions to account for the fast changing pace of mapping and technology. That's understandable.
Conclusion
As for the book itself, I liked it. Although some of the images seem pretty dated even if the book was published in June 2005, I actually learned quite a bit of GIS and cartography from the book. There were some pretty good tips on setting up your own "mapping hacks". I didn't do all 100 hacks but I did some of them and learned by doing, rather than just reading about the hack. I also picked up quite a bit of what I would consider insider knowledge, information about the GIS and mapping industry that I don't necessarily get exposed to because I don't currently work in the field. That alone was worth the price of the book for me.
Just so you know, I pre-ordered the "Google Maps Hacks" book by the two of the authors, Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, at the end of September, but cancelled the order last week because Google Maps came out of Beta and it was just taking too long to get the book.
I wonder if there's a third, more recent book in the works now that Google Maps has come out of Beta, MSN Virtual Earth is gaining ground and the ever-impressive Google Earth, plus Yahoo Maps, and a9 have spanned such interest in GIS and mapping hacks (and mashups)?
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