[Freegis-list] OS GIS book?

[Ari Jolma]

Jo Walsh wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 04:04:21PM -0700, Brent Wood wrote:
>  
>
>>Has anyone compiled a book on OS GIS?
>>
>>With Open Source GIS suites available, Open-EV, FGS, LinGis, Debian GIS, etc,
>>including GRASS, PostGIS, R, GDAL, QGIS, JUMP, GEOS, Proj4, mapserver, deegree,
>>    
>>
>
>
>When Schuyler and Rich originally pitched it to ORA, it was as "Open Source GIS Essentials", but ORA decided they didn't know enough about the GIS publishing market and to test it out with a 'Hacks' book. They have a Mapserver/PostGIS book being written by Tyler Mitchell, which will presumably cover GDAL, proj4 etc in more depth... we'll see
>  
>

It's interesting that there are no books with the word "geoinformatics" 
in the title (amazon gives one, but that's a conference proceedings). 
ORA has several books on "bioinformatics". The GIS books are often about 
business, about GI science, or about GIS as a product or one tool. Maybe 
the OS model and tools like those mentioned above and Perl and Python 
would be more suitable something under the geoinformatics title? I'm 
currently teaching (and learning on the way) a new course of mine called 
"programming in GIS" and using a lot of Perl there and OS tools (gdal, 
proj4, PostGIS, ...) in general. As one of my students said, a 
comprehensive textbook would be very useful. I'm surely going to look 
for those two books mentioned when they come out.

Ari

-- 
Ari Jolma, ari.jolma at hut.fi, Professor of Geoinformatics
Helsinki University of Technology
POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
http://www.hut.fi/~jolma/