[Freegis-list] Book announcement: "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach"

[Markus Neteler]

Dear GRASS Community,
dear FreeGIS enthusiasts,

a long term problem - a missing comprehensive book on how to use GRASS
is overcome. A new book is just leaving the presses:

    Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach

    Markus Neteler, Helena Mitasova 
    1. ed. 2002, 460 pages
    Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, Dordrecht

This hard cover book provides basic information about the use of GRASS from
setting up the spatial database, through working with raster, vector and
site data, to visualization, image processing and hands-on applications.

The book also contains a brief introduction to programming within GRASS and
examples of the GRASS usage with other Open Source software tools, such as
"gstat", "R statistical language", and linking GRASS to "MapServer". The
appendix includes overview of all current commands, list of supported
projections and formats as well as equations used in some modules. To get
some feel for the book, the table of contents and samples are temporarily
available here:

http://mpa.itc.it/grassbook/

We consider publishing a book about GRASS by a major publisher an important
step for GRASS being recognized as a serious, reliable software worth
teaching at academic institutions and for official use in research.
We also think that it is important for GRASS that Kluwer goes to many
conferences where a large number of people may have the opportunity to learn
about GRASS5. Through the publisher, the word about GRASS 5 will get out to
universities, professional organizations, scientific and trade journals and
other places which are hard to reach for us.

Because Kluwer publishes books for narrow audiences (as ours still is), the
cost per book is relatively high. However, the book can be purchased at a
very reasonable price through bulk presales.
For example a pre-sale of 100 books can be done at $50 or pre-sale of 50
books can be done at $60. Presales also lower the final list price which is
over $100 depending on the presales (if you think that is too much, please
read Tim O'Reilly's web site about publishing books, they need to sell many
more books than we can to have around $50-60 list price).

The book is currently in press and should be available within a month or two
- exactly the right time with the GRASS5.0 release.

Currently we are collecting companies, organizations, institutions to
arrange pre-sales at $50 net price per book. The deadline for orders at that
price is Thursday next week. Please let us know whether you would be
interested in presales and help us to make the book more affordable for
everybody.

Thank you,

Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at unity.ncsu.edu>
Markus Neteler  <neteler at itc.it>