I picked up this book as an introduction to the new geographic datatype in SQL 2008.  I had played around with Google maps, and plotting WiFi hotspots I’d detected around my home, but I wanted to do more with this data.  At first, I just stuck the lattitudes and longitudes into decimal fields.  But as soon as I tried to determine distances… I realized this was too complex to build by hand.

So I did some research.  I Googled for some solutions… it didn’t take long until I found that there was a new data type available in SQL 2008.  I wanted to learn more.  I spent the next few weeks looking for anything I could find.  I found this book, and tore through it as quickly as I could.

I worked through the examples, where they seemed to apply to what I was trying to do with the mapping data.  And before long I had put together a quick little query that could point out exactly where a WiFi hotspot was coming from.

If you’re looking to build map based functionality, definitely grab this book and get started today!