Customer Reviews

Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase Design

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

 

 

If you want to learn this much GIS terminology, you have to read hundereds of pages of ESRI's guide or reference books. This is an excellent reference in GIS literature that introduces hundereds of terms in a reasonable size and good price. The author went to the very corners of GIS-data-base structure. For any GIS-term you can find an illustration and explanation. The text is clearly written by an ArcInfo User that is some how "heavy". However,as an ArcGIS/ArcView user it was useful for me. The book title is somehow misleading at the first glance, but when you go inside, you can see no other title can fit this topic. BUY IT, if you want to know the GIS terminology to the extreme details, including backgrounds, comparative explanations and so on. DON'T BUY IT, if you want to do GIS modelling buy reading this book, as the text is mostly concentrates on data base.

I am having a hard time imagining who this book would be useful for. If you are new to GIS, the explanations are pretty dry and contain a good deal of jargon, and there are absolutely NO examples or how-to's. You cannot read this book and expect to learn to do even the simplest operation in GIS. Moreover, without concrete examples, its hard to conceptualize how it all fits together. On the other hand, for someone like me, pretty familiar with basic GIS but wanting to get into more depth, it was too elementary and repetitive. For example, I can't count how many times the author says there are 3 basic kinds of data in a geodatabase... Except for the last 3 chapters (rasters, TINs and location finders) there was little I didn't already know, at least intuitively.

The book is very nicely produced, however. It gives the feel of Powerpoint slides plus the narrative you would hear if you went to an ESRI workshop. Literally every piece of information is explained both graphically and in the text. And of course as software books go, its not too expensive. However, you can get most of this information for free, from the extensive help files that come with ArcView -- plus examples and how-to-use-the-software instructions.

If you're just getting started with GIS, there are lots of getting-started books out there. If you need a lot of depth, try Zeiler's ArcObjects 2-volume set (yes, same author, but much more meaty).

This book works very well for people new to GIS as well as experienced users. The fundamentally important concepts to GIS are explained both generally as well as from within the perspective of the new ESRI ArcInfo 8 software. Difficult and new concepts such as versioning, geometric networks, and raster imagery are particularly well explained. The book is not a software user manual, but rather an explanation of the fundamental GIS concepts, particularly those important to the new Geodatabase.

The book is a veritable corucopia of colorful graphics, figures, and imagery. Many readers will be able to achieve an 80% understanding of the material merely by closely studying the figures and examples - kind of the National Geographic "read the captions" approach.

The text contains lots of class/component diagrams that give a very good overview of the underlaying Geodatabase software architecture. This is a book that I will use and refer back to on a frequent basis. Rock on!

This book gives an overview of the geodatabase CONCEPTS in ESRI's ArcGIS 8.3 and above. This is not a "how-to" guide, but introduces geodatabases and the ubiquitous Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. Readers are at least introduced to the functionality and displays in ArcCatalog and layers. For those just used to simple maps, the concepts of surface modeling with triangulated irregular networks (TIN), geographic networks and flow, and raster data sets were introduced.

For one coming to the geographic databases by way of traditional databases, the concepts of adding attributes to relationships may have been too lightly covered. Additionally the concepts of subtypes (versus attribute domains) to define behavior to different classification of your data was new and useful. The topological operators are introduced, but the rich set of topological rules is barely introduced. Although ArcGis map versioning and workflow some of the concepts of enterprise GIS (as manifest in ArcIMS products and SDE) were not introduced.

Those desiring a how-to guide, would be well served after reading this book to take the ESRI online class "Creating, Editing, and Managing Geodatabases for ArcGIS 9" which has exercises and examples.

Admittedly this is an ESRI perspective of modeling. But as the leaders in the field of GIS software, the ESRI perspective is the accepted standard.

This book does an excellent job of explaining most of the basic concepts that are used in GIS. Terms like TIN and raster are better explained in this book then anywhere else that I have seen. Too often a GIS textbook tries to explain visual concepts with a few black and white diagrams. Not here, the graphics are colorful and very well integrated with the descriptions.

This book is where anyone interested in GIS should start. It is a must have for anyone teaching or studying GIS.

Zeiler conveys a good sense of the ever increasing diversity of GIS usage. He writes for someone who is putting together a geographic database. From his experience, he gives many practical suggestions, spanning frequently occurring issues.

A major idea is that a map has layers. A layer might have data of raster images, or annotations, or lines. Plus, a layer might be a group of layers. Photoshop users will recognise these ideas. But GIS takes them much further. The amount and types of GIS data are often far more than any fancy Photoshop image.

This is the book you need if you want to understand the WHY behind the HOW. It is especially insightful when trying to wrap your brain around what each TOPOLOGICAL realtionship looks like.

It is a little dry and theorhetical, but very extensive and from a classroom standpoint is a MUST in my mind.

I really like this book... It's well-written, and I am finding it helpful for understanding some of the concepts new to the world of ArcGIS.

HOWEVER, to be a useful reference, there needs to be a much, much larger and comprehensive index. That's plain frustrating.

product was exactly what I ordered in excellent condition at a very good price.