Customer Reviews

ArcView GIS/Avenue Developer's Guide with 3.5 Disk

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My experience suggests that online help and the "Learning to Program with AVENUE" (LPwA) manual included with ARCVIEW software is more helpful while learning and programming with AVENUE. As a beginner, working though LPwA was more helpful than this book. My experience with AVENUE is that learning to use the online help (it includes the object model for AVENUE) is the most valuable skill an ArcView User can have.

My suggestion: work through LPwA, learn to use the online help, and spend $50US on a good Visual Basic book (or ArcObjects Developer's Guide by ESRIPress - ~$30US), because AVENUE may soon be phased out in favor of VB in coming versions of ArcView.

Good luck!

As you would infer from the name, this is NOT an instructional book. It consists of two parts. The first is simply a listing of the various Avenue classes. Each listing includes all of the salient features of the class (inheritance, class and instance requests and enumerations). The second part is 101 Avenue scripts. Some scripts are improvements or enhancements to the ESRI-supplied ArcView system scripts; others provide additional functionality. All are useful. I found the class hierarchy section to be the most useful because everything you need to know about a class object is in one place, including inheritances. Especially useful are the instance requests. Another nice feature of the class hierarchy section is a reference to the 101 scripts section. Page references to the script(s) which contains the object are provided. This is useful when you want to see how a particular request or instance may be used. Overall this is an excellent reference. If you are serious about Avenue programming you must have this one.

This book lacks something very fundamnetal : a list of avenue statements or properties. I was trying to write a simple script to turn a tables scientific name data into the proper form, but other than a brief mention of uppercasing in the first chapter no refernece was made to any of the string manipulation features.

Eventually, I found what I was looking for, in the ArcView help file, but it would have been nice to just look up a statement or object property in an index. The book does have some useful examples, but for the price I think the author should have included a list of avenue statements with a brief format and use description.

Doing a project with ArcView, I first discarded the idea of doing some programming in Avenue. Then I discovered this book. It really helped me to develop a simple application into a user-tailored interface. Easy and straight-forward. Don't bother with grasping the syntax, just do it! It's easy and it is fun.