Preface

The best books change the way you look at the world. They take your mind to a different place than where you started. The transformation we experience from a good book is the reason books have survived for centuries as a way to share the breadth of human experience.

This book is about geospatial analysis. Geospatial analysis is the combination of statistical analysis, computational geometry, and image processing applied to data which is tied to the Earth (or even other planets). But that technical definition falls short of what geospatial analysis truly is. Similar to a good book, geospatial analysis tells a story about our world. This story is told through thematic maps, processed satellite images, and tables of information.

These stories quite literally change your worldview by revealing patterns about human behavior and natural processes that are otherwise difficult to discern or are even invisible to us. The increased awareness of our world and our place in it allows us to make better decisions about everything from agriculture to politics to disaster management.

This book will teach you geospatial analysis using the Python programming language. Python is a very popular and easy to learn language used in nearly every field. Python was invented in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum and is based on the language "ABC" designed to teach programming to kids. The clean and intuitive syntax allows you to think about the problem you are trying to solve and not the language you are using. It also interfaces well with nearly every geospatial library available.

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python supplements the library of Packt Publishing with a third book on geospatial technology and Python. The series offered by Packt Publishing covers the most complete range of published knowledge in this domain. In order to understand the scope of this book and its benefits, it helps to be familiar with the other offerings by Packt Publishing.

Python Geospatial Development by Erik Westra covers building desktop and web applications using Python and leading open source geospatial libraries. The focus of the book is capturing well-defined geospatial processes as requirements and then developing applications allowing users to interactively execute that process again and again.

Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook by Eric Pimpler teaches readers how to automate ArcGIS 10.1, the leading Geographic Information System (GIS) software package by Esri. ArcGIS contains a Python environment called ArcPy that provides an interface to nearly the entire package. The book shows how to use Python to script the ArcGIS for a variety of geoprocessing tasks.

Geospatial analysis will allow you to look at the world in a whole new way and with new understanding. And Python will facilitate the journey and even make it fun! This book will serve as both a guide and future reference as you move deeper into this exciting field.