Customer Reviews

Introduction to Mathematical Techniques used in GIS

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I learnt a lot from reading this book. It begins with a simple introduction of the basic but necessary mathematical tools required to understand how GIS software tools and concepts operate. This understanding opens up new opportunities for users to code new functions into the API's that are becoming standard fare of many of the commercial spatial software.

However, the intensity of the contents climb steeply in the middle chapters and the unfocused reader can easily be lost amongst the concepts. Making it to the end of the book will bring a new realization about how our GIS really operates. One good feature is that the chapters are very short and concise, so by the time you are bored, the chapter comes to an end and you can reflect back in sensemaking mode. This is a very understandable book to those who take the patience to read it.

This book covers just about all of the math involved in GIS calculations from basic mathematics and algebra through calculus and statistics. The explanations are very accessible and the examples are clear. However, the book does a rather poor job of tying the mathematics back into solving problems in cartography. In fact, it does not even tackle that job at all. Instead, the first chapter of the book is a rather vague one entitled "Characteristics of Geographic Information" that talks about various mathematical problems in GIS, and that is the end of the discussion for the remainder of the book. Another problem with the book is that there are no exercises for the student. This is a real setback, since there is such a variety of mathematics being presented in this book that I would think that exercises would be not only appropriate but a necessity. Both straight numerical exercises and also a few "projects" that utilize various mathematical concepts in GIS would be very helpful.

If you are an instructor and you think you know how to fill in the gaps left in this book, it would probably make a good template from which to teach, but I would not recommend it to students who intend to self-teach the material.

I used this book for a geospatial math class. The book would briefly cover a math topic. We had to use a lot of handouts and outside sources to understand certain math techniques. Even having taken Calculus II, I didn't understand everything in this book without outside resources.

However, I do believe this is one of the better geospatial math books. But, keep in mind that it is very thin/small and is just more of a "review."