Customer Reviews

GIS for Everyone

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well I didn't like it. I was hopping a deep introduction to GIS but what i got was an introduction to ArcView Explorer. With this book you see the final result of a work but you don't know HOW they did it nor the basis that support it. You can find this information on the net without paying for it.

to ArcExplorer for everyone.
The book is a great introduction for those who want to have a more or less thorough tour of what a GIS is capable of. Being an ESRI press book, it was more or less obvious that its only approach was goin to be through ESRI products (ie. ArcExplorer)
Anyway, the book only shows what can be done with the already processed, already "ArcMade" datafiles. It fails to explain anything else of the GIS creation process.
If you're looking for a technical book, forget it.

We live at a time when more and more information is being converted into digital form. For example, music went from analog (records) to digital (CDs). Movies are going from videotape to DVD. Cameras are transitioning from taking photographs to generating digital images.

Books and maps are also going digital. While the advantages of a digital book are not clearly established, the advantages of digital maps are nothing short of breath-taking. That's because when transformed from paper to digital form, maps become enriched with information that simply cannot be included on a paper map. Davis calls these information rich products "smart" maps.

A whole new industry has emerged that deals with smart maps; it's called the Geographical Information System (GIS) industry. A GIS is computer hardware and software for spatial data handling and map making.

The variety of smart maps is so broad that the ambitious title of the book, GIS for Everyone, is not stretching it too far. Davis shows how students, business people, homemakers, and community leaders can use smart maps for school, work, home, and community action with just a Windows-based personal computer.

A computer program is needed to generate, view, and manipulate smart maps and the data they contain. One such program, ArcExplorer, is provided on the CD that is included with the book.

To generate digital maps requires data files that the computer uses to draw streets, county outlines, country boundaries, volcano locations, hurricane tracks, or any other feature or phenomenon that's mappable. The CD includes some 500 megabytes of such spatial data.

Davis guides the reader (and budding smart map user) through a series of thirteen "explorations" of places and spatial situations around the world from San Diego to Prague to Sydney, with stops at New York, Austin, and Rio de Janeiro. (Additional data, for the reader to explore on their own, are provided for other places such as Yellowstone National Park and Bucharest, Romania.)

The reader is encouraged not only to try his or her hand at exploring a variety of mappable environmental and cultural data and display the resulting smart map(s) on a computer screen but also to print, e-mail, or present the smart map on a web page.

Davis helps the reader/world explorer into the new world of smart maps by focussing on specific themes. In chapter 2, the theme is understanding digital maps. Chapter 3 focuses on finding answers with digital maps. In chapter 4 Davis shows the reader how to tell stories with digital maps. Chapter 5 helps the "reader" build digital maps and the final chapter, 6, helps the reader find additional data sources available on increasing numbers of web sites.

So, if you're interested in exploring your world and beyond (there's a satellite image of Mars on the CD), buy this book and start working with smart maps ASAP!

as someone who has been trying for my entire career to explain what geographical information systems (my speciality) are all about, I was thrilled to find and read this book. It could not be more plainly written: very basic, but gets the idea across about how powerful (and fun) geographically-indexed information can be.

I recommend buying several copies of this book and sending them out to friends & family you might want to offer more of a glimpse into GIS than just sending them to an online atlas. It comes with ESRI's free GIS viewer ArcExplorer and a decent set of data to get started with, and AE itself is a handy tool for letting folks explore work you've done, or sending them work you've done for them (road trip!). Has an appendix for Import71, which is handy.

This book is great fun! The CD has lots of stuff on it to explore, and the 'explorations' are all interesting. One or two parts of the explorations do not function off the 'read only' CD-ROM but will work if you copy the appropriate folders to your hard disk. (The author solved that one for me with a very timely e-mail response.) The ESRI site also has lots of free data files you can use with the included software. Really hard to go wrong here.

Received this tutorial today and imediately started on the lessons. Oops! There are two Glaring errors---so far--in the lesson plans. On page 49, when doing the Address Matcher exercise, an error appears: Cannot Build Geocoding Index. No way to get around it, unless you skip the rest of that lesson and move on. On page 75, at least on my home version of XP, cannot save the file to any format. Call to ESRI Support yielded little to no help at all. I only gave this rating a 3, because the overall lessons are great and it is something worth knowing, but the glitches dampen a bit of the enthusiasm. Hopefully, there wont' be any more on the CDRom.

This book is an excellent introduction to GIS technology. It is a great starting place for those of us new to the technology.

The book with the CD are very useful to learn the basics about ESRI GIS principles. I was looking for a book to help gain some insight into how GIS works; this fulfilled the need.