easy to learn; stricter than HTML (2008-12-25)
The handbook describes an easy to learn KML. It lets you annotate maps, to produce a combined image of a map and your contributions overlaid. KML is a subset of XML. Now if you have never used XML, think then of HTML. KML is as straightforward as HTML. The people who devised KML clearly took inspiration from the success of HTML.

But they also learned from HTML's limitations. HTML is very sloppy in its tag usage. Several types of tags do not need closing tags. While if you have 2 opening tags, in the order A & B, the closing tags can be in (B,A) or (A,B) order. What these and other drawbacks have done is make the writing of HTML parsers much harder than they should have been. In turn, this has led to ambiguities in what is displayed for an HTML page. A big factor in why 2 browsers might display differently the same webpage. These problems were not fully appreciated in the early HTML and browers, and now we're stuck with this legacy.

So KML follows all other XML in these ways. Opening tags must always have closing tags. No exceptions. And tag closing order is in the reverse order to which the tags were opened. If you are coming from an HTML background, you must observe these strictures. Shouldn't be too hard, at least.

Perhaps you might think, so what? Well, suppose you write KML content using the book's help. The chances are that current and future geobrowsers will be more robust and more capable of showing the same views of your content.

Pretty good for novices too (2008-12-14)
If you have ever used Google Earth or Google Maps Satellite View and wondered what was going on as you wandered about some neighborhood with details appearing as you zoomed in, this is a book you might like. In the most casual reading you begin to see the software details that underlie what you have been experiencing.

Great Overview of KML (2008-11-15)
Just received my copy today and spent the afternoon pouring through it. In summary it is an excellent summary of KML and will appeal to both novice and professionals.

This is a step by step guide to writing and using KML programming language to produce enhanced graphics as overlays onto web based mapping programs such as Google Earth. But since KML is an open standard it can be used with almost any geographic program that supports it (such as Microsoft Virtual Earth, ArcGIS, EarthBrowser, etc.).

It has been a long time since a did any programing and I was worried that this book would be over my head, but it is not. It provides step by step directions with excellent colour screen shots to progressively walk the reader through several real world mashups using Google Earth. KML is based on the XML language but you do NOT need to know anything about programming in order to pick up this book and learn how to write and use KML code. Since KML is platform independent this book will be useful if you use PC, Mac or Linux.

Finally there is a website that has examples and KML scripts for downloading (to save some typing). I especially appreciate Appendix A which is a reference for the syntax of all of the KML commands.

In addition to this book, Google's website has a lot of information, examples and practice scripts on KML and how to use it with both Google Earth and Google Maps. If you are just interested in seeing what KML is and how it is used that would be the first place to go as it is FREE. If you like what you see and want to learn more this is THE reference/guide for KML.

Eric