Best geigraphic information systems books according to redditors
We found 2 Reddit comments discussing the best geigraphic information systems books. We ranked the 2 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 2 Reddit comments discussing the best geigraphic information systems books. We ranked the 2 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I'm about to graduate in Geography (GIS) from a very, very human/critical theory focused dept at state school.
My favorite GIS text so far has been Nicholas Chrisman's Exploring Geographic Information Systems. It's not super exciting, but it's kind of historical, covers a huge number of basic elements of information science, and situates it as technical discipline that serves/is grounded in socio-political things. Great for people who've seen the very basics of clip/overlay/make layer in a GIS, but don't have much understanding of the why/how.
Plus there are no fucking screenshots of software menus.
If you've never seen those on a screen, try Price's Mastering ArcGIS series, comes with data and is basically just lots of long, in-depth tutorials. No need to buy the newest version, the software doesn't change that quickly.
It's not a 'beginner' book per se, but a pretty comprehensive coverage of the concepts of Nature and the nature of geography in anglophone traditions plus a number of historical and current takes on the matter: Noel Castree's Nature.
For those interested in scripting/Python with ArcGIS, I can recommend Zandbergen's Python Scripting for ArcGIS and Pimpler's Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook. The former is a textbook proper, teaches some theory, lots of contextual (in terms of the program) information, the later is much more of a straight recipe/how to, with a few pointers about how things might get messed up or why you're seeing that error in that place.
Typically the question isn't asked "where does water go", but rather "where did water come from". So when I would approach these watershed modeling problems I would usually pick a point (a single cell in the dem) and get ArcGIS to trace backwards showing me all the contributing cells.
The answer is actually detailed and has quite a few steps (typical of GIS and modeling) and more than I can write right now, but I can tell you I learned if from a book. This book actually. So if you can find a copy of this book, or just the chapter on Watersheds and Viewsheds, that should help you out a bunch.