Our upcoming book pgRouting: A PRACTICAL GUIDE (publisher LocatePress)
just went on sale a couple of days ago. We currently have a little over 100 pages of content. We expect the final published book to weight in at a little over 250 pages.
pgRouting is a PostgreSQL extension that also utilizes PostGIS for solving routing problems. Routing problems involve application of costs to network paths as well as considerations of the parties involved such as kinds vehicles, people, packages etc. that will be carried across these networks.
While routing is often applied to physical networks like roads and bike paths, the fundamentals of routing go beyond the physical. Spatial concepts such as edges and nodes are a convenient way of visualizing costs across even a logical network.
If you purchase now, you'll get the following benefits:
- Significant discount off the eBook final price. Currently 50% off
- Our current preview draft and updates to the draft as we update it
- Input via our discussion page of what you'd like to see covered. That could be specific functions or kinds of examples or just some clarity.
The focus of this book is pgRouting 2.1+. It's really hard to talk about pgRouting without giving some air time to PostGIS and PostgreSQL, which are some of the key foundations of pgRouting. As such expect to see a lot of talk of PostGIS and PostgreSQL in this book. Since pgRouting 2.0 is so different from pgRouting 2.1, we had to make a difficult decision to focus on the future rather than the past. The appendix does cover some content of how things were done in pgRouting 2.0 and how they changed in pgRouting 2.1+. You can expect the appendix discussion to be expanded. For the core of the book we've largely abandonned any mention of pgRouting 2.0 though pgRouting 2.1 is for the most part backward compatible with pgRouting 2.0 if you choose to be limited by the pgRouting 2.0 function signatures.
We've been pushing package maintainers to focus on releasing pgRouting 2.1 rather than sticking with pgRouting 2.0 and also encouraging maintainers who haven't carried pgRouting before, to start doing so. The PostGIS 2.2 windows bundle comes packaged with pgRouting 2.1 for example. Yes these are selfish reasons, but FOSS is inherently a selfish scratch your own itch kind of pursuit, and that's a good thing since all our common self-interests come together to make something very special that will change the world.
We are planning for the book to be released in another 3-4 months. I know we had planned to release around now, but as happens with every book we've written so far, as we get deeper into it, we realize, keeping it baking just a little longer is so much better than rushing thru the process and outputting a half-baked pie. Although pgRouting 2.2 is still being heavily worked on, the development version is almost feature complete and slated for release in next three to four months. As such we plan to cover some new features coming in pgRouting 2.2 and hope pgRouting 2.2 is out just before or around the same time as this book.
