Getting to Know ArcView GIS [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

~ ESRI Press (Author) "Desktop GIS. If you've already heard of it, you may know it as an immensely powerful computer mapping system..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A great educational breakthrough... the highest value today in desktop GIS educational material." -- Susan Elshaw Thrall, GeoInfo Systems magazine

"This is a wonderful book--ideal for neophytes and professionals alike." -- Dr. Bruce Davis, Author GIS: A Visual Approach

Product Description

This book with its illustrated exercises and CD-ROM support material, explain how GIS takes geographic information and makes it visually understandable to users.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 654 pages
• Publisher: Esri Press; 3rd ed. edition (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879102463
• ISBN-13: 978-1879102460
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #651,586 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful for class or self-study, November 30, 2001

By	William A. Huber (Rosemont, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have repeatedly used this book as the first text in an ArcView-based university course on GIS. The book uses realistic problems and settings to illustrate, step-by-step, how ArcView can be used to solve the problems and perform the needed analyses. In so doing, it serves as a good introduction to vector data analysis.

The detailed illustrations and sample software (a CD with a version of ArcView restricted to the data on the CD) enable anybody to follow through this book and work at their leisure. The text is somewhere at a junior high school level in terms of what it assumes, but it is in no way patronizing or simplistic: even graduate students have found it useful.

Sometimes follow-on analyses are suggested or sketched, but no problems are given. This is a pity, because students need additional problems to reinforce what they have just learned. Once you work through all the steps that are shown, there's nothing much else left to do.

In a few cases, the suggested analytical method is deficient. For example, in an early chapter students are shown how to site a soccer field within an open space--but the solution they derive is incorrect because the features are not projected! Other than these few deficiencies, the book is accurate and free of mistakes.

This book covers only the basic capabilities of ArcView, although at the end it briefly describes raster analysis (Spatial Analyst) and network analysis (Network Analyst).

The good design, attention to detail, and experience with GIS as well as with the software let this book rise above many others of its genre.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy As Can Be, January 19, 2000

By	Mark (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

Having a class called "Natural Hazard Mitigation", we are currently learning the basics of Arcview GIS. This book has made it very easy as it explains step by step on how to use each application within the program. The book also includes a CD-Rom to download to Windows for use of learning most of the lessons. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn the basics of Arcview GIS.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Getting to Know ArcView, June 30, 2002

By	Paul Jameson (Oceanside, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is another teaching book with a CD. The CD works well and does what it is supposed to do. Although the cover says the CD is a trial version of ArcView. That is just a lie. The CD contains a special version of ArcView that works only with the exercises.

The book spends too much time introducing itself. It is itself an introduction but the first 100 or so pages are spent saying what they resay in the remaining chapters; and with terms the novice will probably not understand at first. I found that the book had a hard time begining, kept thinking, "When are they going to get to the point?"

Would like to see more about how to convert raw data to a file that can displayed; it finally came in chapter in 25 but only briefly.