A new two-week course on the Udacity platform taught by Google insiders shows how to use the Google Maps APIs to integrate maps and location features into a website, and how to make in-browser web service calls to various Web Service APIs.

The Google Maps API is a very popular way to add location information to a website, as course instructor Emily Keller, Google maps for Work Technical Program Manager points out in the promo video for the course:

Hosted by Udacity with content developed by Google, this free self-paced course has approximately 12 hours of content and is at intermediate level. The prerequisites recommend prior experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development, but also add:

If you’re a scrappy developer, or just want to learn about the functionality without development, go ahead and jump in at any level!

A better idea of who the course is aimed at and what it will teach you is provided by this short video in which Emily is joined by Ajay Hemnani who explains that during the course you'll see the instructors build a real estate listings site:

The course consists of three lessons each with several short videos and "learn by doing" exercises.

Lesson 1: Getting Started with the APIs

Practice loading the Google Maps JavaScript API and creating a map, styling it, showing markers and infowindows, loading and use various libraries, and creating street view panoramas. Learn about the Static Maps and Street View imagery APIs.

Lesson 2: Understanding API Services

Learn when to use Web Services vs. Services within the JavaScript API. Practice getting addresses from coordinates, calculating the distances, travel times, and directions between multiple locations, obtaining the elevation or time zone of a point, and looking for places of interest around a location/matching a search query.

Lesson 3: Using the APIs in Practice

Learn about monitoring your projects API usage, and securing your identifiers. Check out where to go with questions, how to find information in documentation. Familiarize with some terms of use and other important details.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info