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What books, journals, electronic resources have you found most valuable for expanding your knowledge in the GI field? To which of them you come back most often?
One item per post please.

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hey everybody, 1 book per post please. I can't upvote How to lie with maps without also upvoting GIS for web developers which is not relevant for me. Thanks – matt wilkie♦ Jul 23 '10 at 17:36
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I respectfully disagree, as I'd rather read through 30 than 100 posts – dassouki Jul 23 '10 at 19:09
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@dassouki the community standard for Stack Exchange sites is to encourage one vote per answer for "List of X" style questions to avoid duplicates and make voting easier. I have to admit that I didn't do it myself on this question though. – JasonBirch Jul 31 '10 at 5:20
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34 Answers

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up vote 28 down vote accepted

Not entirely a GIS Book but very helpful in many map design problems is Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

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Love Tufte, but if I had to choose just one of his books, from a map design perspective, I'd pick Envisioning Information. – neuhausr Nov 19 '10 at 14:26
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up vote 1 down vote

I'm using the AAG's GIS&T Body of Knowledge as a guideline for my studying efforts.

It doesnt contain theory, but indicates what's the next logical step and where I should look for it. It contains extensive references and explain the core learning units of GI and GIScience.

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up vote 9 down vote

I'm biased towards transportation, but here a few books (mostly reference type) I cannot live without:

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  • Field related: NCHRP Travel Demand Modeling (report 365)
  • Field related: Transit Quality of Service Manual - TCRP 100 Note there is an outdated rural version of this that I DO NOT recommend
  • Field related: Forecasting Demographics
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up vote 0 down vote

I have a pretty frequent rotation of books. Right now the current ones are:

  • Flattening The Earth
  • OpenGL ES 2 Gold Book
  • Rosen Discrete Mathematics (5th Ed)

For the most part I just use Google when I need to look something up.

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up vote 3 down vote
  • Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics

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up vote 0 down vote

These are off the top of my head.

  • HP 48GX calculator. Excellent for converting DMS to DD.
  • Least Squares Adjustment
  • Mapping Hacks
  • Oracle DBA 11g
  • Introduction to Remote Sensing; James B. Campbell
  • Fundamentals of Spatial Information Systems; Robert Laurini
  • Web Mapping Illustrated
  • Geographic Information Systems: A Management Perspective; Stan Arnoff
  • Ready to Run Visual Basic Algorithms
  • Head First Design Patterns

The Internet: like gis.stackexchange.com

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up vote 18 down vote

Here's my "recent" favourites, both cartography-related:

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Unfortunately, and this is kind of sad, I have to admit that I haven't read a single GIS book in years.

The basic principles and practices of GIS haven't changed more than incrementally in the last half-decade, and the cool new technologies--commercial mapping APIs, KML, REST, location-based games and services, etc--have all been advancing at a frenetic pace since 2005 (note the publication date of the two books above)

If new technology matters to you (and it should) and you think you can rely on books, you may as well give up and go home. To survive in this environment, you need to be adept with blogs and online documentation, and be willing to experiment.

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Up vote for the commentary on newer applications of GIS. – jvangeld Jul 31 '10 at 0:39
up vote 1 down vote

The Coming Singularity by Ray Kurzweil, has some food for thought, although I don't agree with a lot of what he says. It won't take that much intelligence for a sentient computer network to realize the largest threat to his/her planet are the humans.

Perhaps GIS should be the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, next to Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics.

Update: OK, I guess I should suggest something more immediately useful:
Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures by Hanan Samet is excellent if you want a clear explanation of algorithms.

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up vote 18 down vote

Map Projections: A Working Manual (PDF, 380pages) by John P. Snyder

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up vote 28 down vote

Geospatial Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide to Principles, Techniques, and Software Tools Smith, Goodchild, Longley 2007

Entire text is online: http://www.spatialanalysisonline.com/

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A solid guide to how geospatial analysis work, particularly with respect to GIS. The book emphasizes conceptual workflows, but still provides the basic math. I found the math quite helpful for creating my own code and also getting an understanding of what's happening under the hood in contemporary GIS.

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up vote 8 down vote

Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools by Gary Sherman.

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It's the first book I give out to folks when they're looking to learn a little about GIS and open source.

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GIS for Web Developers pragprog.com/titles/sdgis/gis-for-web-developers from the same series is pretty good intro as well. – radek Aug 5 '10 at 9:38
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up vote 27 down vote

PostGIS In Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu http://www.manning.com/obe/

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An excellent tutorial and resource on spatial databases in general and PostGIS in particular. The book is currently available through Manning's Early Access Program in .pdf format, the paper version will be out relatively soon.

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Fantastically useful book - I subscribed to the e-copy during its development and couldn't wait for the printed copy which is now never far from my desk. – Adrian Aug 15 '11 at 12:58
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I'm finding this book extremely useful as I learn PostGIS – djq Nov 25 '11 at 23:08
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up vote 6 down vote

Burrough and McDonnell's Principles of Geographic Information Systems is also a good one. It provides you with most of the basic and higher level GIS concepts. It is software agnostic which means you can very much apply the principles in any tool you use.

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up vote 0 down vote

Lining Up Data in ArcGIS is great if you want to learn about data projections.

Can anyone suggest a good book for using Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008?

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up vote 5 down vote

I really like Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Earle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh. http://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Hacks-Tools-Electronic-Cartography/dp/0596007035/

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The book is divided up into 100 very creative 'hacks' that teach you about mapping, spatial data, opensource tools to work with data, and in the process inspire you to create or tackle the geospatial problems/hacks that you encounter in your work or personal life. One of my favorites is 'Will the Kids Barf'. It examines road sinuosity by comparing straight line distance with actual road distance to come up with an index to predict if the kids will get car sick.

This book It was published in 2005, so some of the references to APIs, etc. are a little dated, but the creativity, concepts, and inspiration are still very current.

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up vote 4 down vote

Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase design (Michael Zeiler)

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Great introduction into spatial data and geodatabases. Otherwise, e.g. for code implementation, I rely more on blogs and forums.

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up vote 4 down vote

Numerical Recipes, 3rd edition

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Great book with algorithms with nice, clear explanations of the maths behind them and implementations, which are very robust and (usually) as fast as they get. Very good for matrices, fitting, statistics... The 3rd edition includes a chapter on computational geometry, which is especially useful in GIS.

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Note that you need to buy a license to use the source code of the book (which is the key of this book). – markusN Nov 20 '10 at 13:57
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up vote 5 down vote

Using Google BookShelf

Mapperz Cartographic Library:

*http://books.google.com/books?uid=2172977016546618007&as_coll=1001&source=gbs_lp_bookshelf_list [Broken link due to google services]

I don't have room for the Klencke Atlas :( http://mapperz.blogspot.com/2010/01/klencke-atlas-big-maps-in-big-book.html

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up vote 16 down vote

Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications

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The best computational geometry book. Very good at explaining (with illustrations) the various algorithms and concepts often used in GIS, such as triangulation, indexing, calculating intersection, shortest paths etc.

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up vote 0 down vote

I am going to go a different direction with this question. I have eliminated my bookshelf and now am an avid Evernote user. I load all my documents in there and always have them with me. The top docs for GIS I have stored are:

Boston GIS Tutorials

Best Practices for Creating an ArcGIS® Server Web Mapping Application for Municipal/Local Government

Developer’s Guide:Create GeoWeb Applications with the Sample Flex Viewer

ERSI System Design Strategies

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up vote 1 down vote

Computational Geometry is a good one for gis developers who have to handle or understand complex data structures

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I remember running into a few errors in this book, specifically with polygon triangulation. I forget what edition it was though. – Dandy Aug 30 '10 at 16:24
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up vote 10 down vote

Cartographic Relief Presentation by Eduard Imhof is the single best book I've read on cartography to date. Before ESRI Press republished the book in 2007 the only way to get was through inter-library loan via the University networks, and wait a number of months. It's still worth reading the original 1965 (Swiss/German) or 1982 (English) edition if you can as the reprint moves all the colour plates to the back of the book, and there is (an unavoidable) shift in colours and line detail. Cartographic Relief Presentation is more than forty years old, and still relevant. There's even an arcgis tool and photoshop method modelled after his Swiss Style Shaded Relief.

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There are a hundred quotes I could pull out, but this is the one which strikes me today: "it is a mistake to believe the quality of a map depends primarily on the expenditure of money, time and labor. ...more decisive are the capability, experience, and expertise of the mapmaker. The expert always uses the simplest approach. ... He can show with a few lines what an unskilled worker would require many lines to depict. ...high density of information with poor selection is less efficient than a map with less content but good selection.

Section of school wall map of the Canton of Zurich, 1:50 000. 1934 Section of school wall map of the Canton of Zurich, 1:50 000. 1934 (see exhibit)

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