About the Authors

Alper Dincer is a civil engineer with an MS degree in Geographical Sciences. He has more than 10 years of experience in developing web and mobile GIS/LBS projects.

Since the beginning of his career, he was always passionate about maps and geo stuff. He started working as a research assistant at a university and then moved to a governmental agency to work with maps. He is also the co-founder of a tech company named Mekansal.

He also has some achievements relating to geo web projects. In 2009, he got the first place in the ESRI Developer Summit Mashup Challenge with his open source project ExtMap. ExtMap was based on the Google Maps JavaScript API v2. He is one of the Google Qualified Developers of the Google Maps JavaScript API program. In 2010, he also worked as a proctor in the same program as a volunteer.

As a developer and entrepreneur, he still likes coding with JavaScript, PHP, and Objective-C on different web and mobile projects. He completely agrees with Steve Jobs' quotes "Love what you do" and "Stay hungry, stay foolish".

First, I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Begum—the light of my life—for understanding my passion for coding and the digital world. I would like to thank God for having her in my life. Words cannot express my gratitude and love to her.

Second, I wish to acknowledge my loving family, who are always there for me.

Balkan Uraz is a city planner with an MS degree in Geographical Sciences. He has over 15 years of experience in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Throughout his career, he has worked on several projects with one thing in common: GIS. In the early days of his career, he worked on projects involving municipal GIS and city information systems. He has also worked as a research assistant while he was conducting the tedious work on his thesis on routing systems.

He has worked on major LBS projects for mobile operators in Turkey that involve both software development and building the data inventory. He co-founded a tech company that specialized in navigation data collection and navigation products. He has also been a GIS consultant for major companies operating in the areas of field tracking and real estate.

In all his projects, he has worked around the same passion: building up the spatial infrastructure.

I would like to thank Esra for her love, support, and encouragement while writing this book. I would also like to thank my fellow colleagues for their enthusiasm and encouragement that lead to writing this book.