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.
