Best guide I've seen on mapserver. Does a fine job of getting a new user going. Could use more trouble shooting.

I purchased this book to help with developing a simple map-enabled web page running on a Windows computer. The book proved very difficult to use in that context. If you are planning on working on a windows computer, you should be aware of some potential shortcomings.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have considerable GIS experience, but little experience with web development.

The book assumes that you are operating not only on a UNIX-based platform, but also that you will operate in a particular "development environment". The author does provide full instructions for building that development environment on a Unix machine, so if you are starting from scratch, everything will work as described.

However....

You can not readily build the same "development environment" on a Windows computer. I installed a version of MS4W ("Mapserver 4 Windows" on my computer. MS4W is a labor saving package that rapidly sets up a web server and installs most of the other open source software one would like to have available for using Mapsource effectively. Unfortunately, the installation differs from the "development environment" assumed by the book.

As a result, there are MANY small but significant differences that crop up in developing the example applications given in the book. Many of these are simply differences in the way files are named or in the structure of the directory tree, but they are annoying and difficult to track down. it took me several DAYS of work and repeated searches for help on on-line MAPSERVER forums to figure things out and get the first several example applications running. I still have not managed to get about half of the examples up and running.

That said, the book offers a nice introduction to many of the central concepts used in Mapserver. It has a good reference section that allows you to look up Mapserver commands, etc.

Ultimately, I was able to develop the simple web-based applications I was after. This book contributed to that, but only after considerable frustration. Several Mapserver tutorials are available on-line. Some are specifically geared to Windows-based systems. They certainly offer a less tortuous, if sometimes less complete, path to getting Mapserver working on a Windows-based system.

Beginning MapServer should not be your only source of information on using MapServer. The book has a lot of usefull examples in it, but I am missing something. My main interest is on how to use MapServer through PHP /MapScript. In particlar I would like to know more on the bindings from PHP/MapScript to the object model in MapServer.

Do not expect the book to cover it all. It tries, but doesen't quite make it.

Still - buy it! You need it for your library, I am sure you do ;-)

The book is written in a very clear way and goes to the point explaining mapserver thru examples, it should be a reference book for those, that are starting with mapserver, but it lacks a proper cover of raster layers and WCS. Interresting is that the prefered database used, is not PosGIS but MySQL (normally MySQL is pushed aside by PostGIS in spatial databases projects) this was a pleasent surprise, since I normally use MySQL. Conclusion: get the book