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GIS Thoughts

Not your grandfathers GIS textbook!!

Spent the weekend flicking through a very cool new book on GI and GIS technologies, “Mapping Hacks” a product of the people behind the mapping hacks website.

This is great stuff, it bites off all the basic principles of GeoData in small chunks, from the perspective of someone actually trying to build practical solutions. This would be a great alternative text book to the more academic standard texts used to teach on GIS Masters courses, at least it should develop some enthusiasm in students, I will certainly recommend this to the students on the Masters programme I’m external examiner for !

It’s just a shame it missed the google map hack phenomenon , but hey thats for the second edition !!

The movement towards Open Source geodata continues – there is still someway to go until we need to think about co-existence strategies with commerical geodata but that time will come.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

3 replies on “Not your grandfathers GIS textbook!!”

Mapping Hacks just arrived here as well so I’ve been flicking through it the past few days. I think one of the great things about it is that it will appeal to all sorts of different people instead of just being targetted at those who had an interest in geography prior.

And it is a shame the first edition missed all the fun with Google. I’m experimenting with the Maps API as a way of displaying the photos from my site.

This is really quite a hefty book in the Hacking series and I am very pleased that O’Reilly is now incorporating color images into more of their books. It is really chock full of ideas and examples – I get enthused every time I pick up the book and and read several of the hacks. It will take some time to really digest much of what is presented here. There’s some stuff they sort of missed (besides Google Maps) or other topics that could have been more thorough but that’s nickpicking a fantastic reference. In fact, I am rather envious – looking back I wished something like this were done 15+ years ago. The freely available code and data was there but not the critical mass, much less the open source movement and the world wide web.

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