Foreword by Jens & Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps Tech Leads

...readers should be warned that this book is definitely not for the faint hearted. Readers will need a passing knowledge of a number of programming languages as well as an understanding of web technology. For those willing to rise to the challenge, the rewards in harnessing the power of Google Maps to your own websites could be enormous. - John Bryant, BJHC & IM, November 2006

Schuyler Erle was born in a small paper bag in Philadelphia, and then again five days later in Baltimore. As a youth, he had to get up every morning two hours before he went to bed in order to walk fifteen miles uphill to school, and then another seventeen miles uphill to get home in the evening. After many years of some nonsense involving Karnaugh maps, a botched attempt at a Red Cross sailing certificate, and the early works of Chomsky, Schuyler was finally and at long last sent packing with something his mentors found at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Later, after a tragic accident that left him nearly completely lacking in common sense, he served brief stints on Phobos and Ganymede with the Space Patrol, before returning to study n-dimensional unicycle frisbee golf at a yak herding collective in Miami. Somewhere along the line he made the grave error of attempting to implement a full-scale multi-user web application using a combination of tcsh, awk, and sed, which lead him straight into the arms of O'Reilly & Associates, first as a reader, and then as an author and humble developer. Four years & fifty thousand miles later, we present him in his full and unabridged form, where he hacks Perl behind the scenes at the O'Reilly Network, does on-site technical support for ORA's fine conferences team, is involved in a variety of database and production development projects across the company, and still manages to write and give conference talks for ORA from time to time. Rich Gibson is a Perl/Database programmer in Santa Rosa. He has worked professionally with computers since 1982 when he created Public Utility Rate Case Models in SuperCalc on an Osborne II. While the technology has changed, his fascination with using finger muscle power to control electrical impulses has not. His current fascination is creating tools to aid in the acquistion, management, and presentation of information with a geographic component. He is currently converting an old golf cart into a mobile geo annoation platform. He is active with the NoCat Community Network in Sebastopol, California. In his free time he dives for Abalone and Halibut and tries to keep up with his wife and three explosively active kids.Jo Walsh is a freelance hacker and software artist who started out building web systems for the Guardian, the ICA and state51 in London. She now works with the semantic web, spatial annotation and bots.