There is a hidden revolution going on: geography is moving from niche to the mainstream. News reports routinely include maps and satellite images. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are showing up more and more frequently as standard features in automobiles and cell phones. Many of the major database vendors have made geographic data types standard in their flagship products.

This book will demystify GIS and show you how to make GIS work for you. You'll learn the buzzwords and explore ways to geographically-enable your own applications. GIS is not a fundamentally difficult domain, but there is a slight barrier to entry because of the industry jargon. This book will show you how to "walk the walk" and "talk the talk" of a geographer.

You'll learn how to find the vast amounts of free geographic data that's out there and how to bring it all together. Although this data is free, it's scattered across the web on a variety of different sites, in a variety of incompatible formats. You'll see how to convert it among several popular formats---including plain text, ESRI Shapefiles, and Geographic Markup Language (GML).

With this book in hand, you'll become a real geographic programmer using the Java programming language. You'll find plenty of working code examples in Java using some of the many GIS-oriented applications and APIs. You'll be able to:

• display GIS data on the web
• manipulate GIS data programmatically
• store and retrieve it in geographically-enabled databases