OpenLayers does seem to be painfully lacking in quality documentation. The best thing I've found in my searching is this Stack Overflow post. The first response includes some interesting nuggets of information, but more importantely a link to the OpenLayers Examples page, which has a pretty impressive collection of demos with reasonably self-explanatory Javascript.

EDIT:

I also just found this OpenGeo tutorial, which is a very readable gentle introduction to concepts, though not terribly deep.

Christopher Groskopf

550

Honestly? There is no good way to learn OpenLayers besides tearing apart the examples that Chris linked you to and falling on your face many, many times. The documentation is absolutely miserable and the code is sometimes very frustrating, but if you muddle through the example code enough it will all start to make some sense.

kenschwencke

20

Ken's totally right--the documentation blows. At one point while I was muddling through I got pissed off enough to post a few super simple examples of the things that the official docs didn't bother to demonstrate. I'm sure I did everything wrong, so caveat emptor. I've moved on, but apparently the examples are still available where I left them here: http://projects.mcall.com/media/kml/index.html

jacobfenton

180

A List Apart (wonderful resource in general for all kinds of browser-based goodness) did a good piece a couple of years ago on rolling your own mapping stack using OpenLayers: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/takecontrolofyourmaps

Justin Myers

0