Customer Reviews

ESRI Guide to GIS Analysis, Volume 2: Spatial Measurements and Statistics

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

 

 

Although the book gives nice examples on ways to analyze spatial data, this ESRI book lacks specifics on how to do this in their base software or extensions. Documentation for CrimeStat by Ned Levine and Associates explains spatial analysis better, is free and is cited in this book. The documentation for CrimeStat is also better.

This is definitely not a book for advanced users in spatial statistics or a tutorial-based book of how to use spatial statistics in GIS. As the author described at the very beginning, this is an introductory book for people who have used GIS but know very little about statistics. Personally, I think this book works best if you already took your intro to GIS and basic statistic class so you already know a little bit of both. It explains how two of them can work together to solve the questions you have in mind about the real world problems.

Besides the complimentary approach, I give this book five stars because of 1) the writing style is extremely accessible. Even he does not go through all the details on statistics, the author explains the statistic concepts a lot better than any other books I have read for my statistic class. 2) the graphics, including maps and charts, are extremely helpful to compare the concepts and different methods he describes in the book. 3) the comparison between different spatial statistic are very useful if you are puzzled with different spatial statistic tools available in your ArcGIS toolbox when the "Help" is not helpful at all! 4) it gives you various reference if you are interested in exploring specific topics.

If you want to explore your data beyond thematic mapping and want to know whether the patterns you see are statistically significant or not, this is a book that will open the door of spatial statistic to you. If you are a visual person but hate statistics, this book might change that as well!

This book provides a useful introduction to the concepts of measuring spatial distributions, identifying patterns and clusters, and identifying patterns. There is the basic information about how to identify geographic centers with mean and median, and general statistical distributions and tests of significance. The section on identifying clusters was good, but the nearest neighbor hierarchical clustering is only available in Crime stat. One disappointing thing about this book from ESRI, is there is not a mention of what specific ArcGIS toolbox item can be used to generate the statistic. It was also not always clear what analysis made sense for lines, polygons or points. A further discussion of raster analysis and the connection between measures of mean, and some of the raster neighborhood statistics would have been useful. .

Excellent, simple, reference book for GIS analysis. If you are a beginner with GIS analysis this book is ideal, at the same time, if you use more advanced methods, but are not constantly using the technology you will definitely want this as a reference. When in doubt with more complicated methodology, go back to the basics with this book. I lost it and got it again, this is how useful I think it is.

Spatial statistics can be a very cumbersome topic, but Mitchell goes through it in a good, linear fashion. I don't need to know the mathematics behind the statistical methods (although he provides them) I instead want to know when and how the tools are applied.

Even though this is an ESRI book, several of the topics he discusses are actually not available in ArcGIS. It also falls short of showing how to run any particular software package, but that makes it more universal for study with other software.

Now it has the added benefit of having a tutorial book that follows it chapter by chapter ... including the ESRI Guide to GIS Analysis Vol 2. The book is GIS Tutorial II, and you can order it and both Mitchell books bundled into a special price!

GIS Tutorial II: Spatial Analysis Workbook for version 9.3 and
GIS Tutorial 2: Spatial Analysis Workbook for version 10.

It is a very nice book which helps for those that teach and learn GIS and statistic. I have got it as my expectation and interest.

this is vol 2 that goes with the Tutuorial Vol 2 book - well written and VERY understandable!

Due to ESRI's share of the GIS market, they assume that they have the midas touch when it comes to all things spatial. This book just about sucks. Yes, there are pretty pictures (in this case all from ArcGIS, go figure?) but that doesn't mean it's a masterpiece. The text is very diffucult to decipher. It reads more like a term paper reciting facts poorly; in fact it feels like the author resisted the urge to cut and paste from source publications by obfuscating the ideas with poor style and even poorer word choices. In the wrong hands a thesaurus can be a weapon. A weapon that destroys content. I really tried to read this book, but couldn't get past the first 20 pages. If you want to learn anything about advanced spatial statistics for instance, you should read the books that the author cites, not this book. OK, so what if you wanted to have this book around as a reference item to help you through a specific spatial analysis problem? The Table of Contents is no help at all and the index is pitiful. And once you've found the example you're looking for, it doesn't really show you how to do it, or why it's done for that matter, just an objective description of what it would look like in ArcGIS.

The only good idea behind this book is how it intermixes geographic examples. For instance, it shows urban geography problems side by side with biogeography problems. But again this suffers, mainly due to lay out problems. The visual illustrations seem to be at odds with the text. Oh BTW, the font is cumbersome and the spacing is confusing. There aren't any boxes that highlight important ideas or underlined phrases or shaded areas in the text, there is nothing in the layout to help you learn the material. I'm pretty sure this book was laid out in Word!

With this latest book, ESRI must be banking on those agencies and institutions that can afford to buy ESRI products in the first place, that have a standing order with the company to gobble up all things ESRI.

This is a lightwieght description on GIS concepts and how to use GIS software, not how to develop GIS software.