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I am preparing an intermediate GIS course for graduate and undergraduate students who have likely not been in touch with anything but ESRI software. It is an existing course in the curriculum that I will be teaching for the first time. Currently, ArcGIS is the weapon of choice for the lab sections and practical assignments.

I want to tweak the course a little to include an introduction to Open Source GIS alternatives. For now, this part of the course will only be two to four weeks (I'm thinking a kind of extended epilogue) so I won't be able to dig too deep. I hope to branch this off into a full Open Source GIS course next year, but curriculum constraints prohibit me from doing that right away.

Here's some reading I have ben considering to support the Open Source GIS part of the course, to give you an idea of what I'm (not) looking for:

  • The Geospatial Desktop is a book I'd love to use for a full Open Source GIS course but is too much to cover in a few weeks. The chapter 'Survey Of Desktop Mapping Software' looks like something I could use.
  • The Dekstop GIS book is of similar breadth but currently out of print.
  • The Grass Book seems too focused on GRASS. I think GRASS will put students with an ArcGIS mindset off. Also, I want them to learn to appreciate the breadth of the OS geospatial software spectrum.
  • 'How to go from GIS novice to Pro without spending a Dime' takes a good, practical approach to delving into OS GIS, and has good links for further reading.
  • A white paper from OpenGeo talking about markets for geospatial software, and how that landscape is changing.

Can you suggest other articles and / or books that would be useful to ease students coming from an ESRI / ArcGIS background into appreciating and using Open Source alternatives?

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4 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Programming books are out-of-date before they are published, so the only ones I find useful are more general ones dealing with theory and processes. There is nothing specific to open-source GIS in these cases (apart from maybe a business point-of-view).

The last printed opensource book I bought, which is still available on Amazon, is Beginning MapServer, and relates to v4.0. We are now on v6.0, and I doubt many of the samples will still work. It does provide a nice background on how the project started, and a good chapter on projections, but not open-source specific.

So it is probably better to go directly to individual project's documentation, and take a few different examples such as:

Desktop: QGIS

The QGIS project provides a gentle GIS introduction, a User Guide, a Coding and Compilation Guide and a API Documentation in english and in some cases also translated into several foreign languages.

http://qgis.org/en/documentation/manuals.html

Web (client-side): OpenLayers

OpenLayers documentation (the amount of prose in the docs is on the rise) - http://docs.openlayers.org/

Web (server-side): GeoServer

This User Manual is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of using GeoServer. Whether you are a novice or a veteran of this software

http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/

An even better way would be to get students to download the software and work through the many examples available on these sites if they really want to get an overview of what the software is capable.

A great resource for this is the OSGeo Live DVD:

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Xubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around.

Students can download the ISO and run - this takes away much of the pain of some OS installation - especially on Windows, and lets people get right to using the software.

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+1 - especially regarding getting students to work through examples / tutorials. That's especially valuable, and I've seen a few ESRI-only folk pick up QGIS that way. – Simbamangu Mar 21 '12 at 7:35
up vote 4 down vote

For open-source database management, you may also want to direct them to PostGIS in Action (@Manning Publications or @Amazon). I found it very useful in understanding how to put together, maintain, and optimize data in the PostgreSQL/PostGIS environment. It also has a chapter on other open-source tools (web & desktop viewers) that could prove valuable.

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up vote 3 down vote

Actually the Desktop GIS book is back in print from Locate Press see http://geospatialdesktop.com/, that combined with the Web GIS book from Scott Davis are excellent introductory texts.

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up vote 1 down vote

For GeoDjango and learning to create Web based GIS application you can use the following two books, both for beginners and guide you very well

  1. Python Geospatial Developement. - Erik Westra
  2. OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner's Guide - Eik Hazzard

The second book is for OpenLayers which uses javascript on ExtJS library. These are great book which will surely help you get started. I have myself used them as I too came from ESRI background.

Also the Geoserver Suite is a complete package that is going to truly allow you to develop you application and also maintain the data.

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The first book gets very mixed reviews on Amazon, with the negative ones pointing out that the examples have errors in them and don't run out of the box. There's only a few reviews for this book, so I am not sure what to make of this. Before I recommend this book, or even order it for myself, I would love to hear from people here what their personal experiences are. Does it indeed leave the impression of being rushed to publication? – mvexel May 9 '12 at 14:02
Ya there are few errors. Since it is python, most of the errors are indentations, which are easy to find out. But what is more important is that it guides you very well if u are entering the open source for the first time. – Sam007 May 9 '12 at 16:34

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