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Does anyone have a recommendation for a good reference/tutorial(s) on Spatial Analyst? The most recent I can find are from early to mid 2000s. Or has SA simply not changed much in 7 years? Thanks, appreciate it.

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Changes to SA have focused on supporting more file formats. Apart from simple changes in command syntax and a few tweaks (such as PathDistance, which enhances CostDistance), it has offered essentially the same suite of capabilities since 1995 (which are those in by the former GRID module for ArcInfo written, I guess, some 30 years ago). In fact, much of SA is still just a wrapper around GRID. Indeed, if you read through Dana Tomlin's book (Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling, 1990) you should quickly be able to master SA. – whuber♦ Jan 19 '11 at 23:15

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The online help, for ArcGIS 10 http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html?TopicName=welcome will provide better help than has been provided before, but as Bill suggests, the fundamental concepts exist in Tomlin's book and haven't been altered significantly. The book's principles are also applicable to any GIS package that works with raster data and supports map algebra. Others will hopefully provide similar links to open source software packages that have similar help information online.

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direct link to the "quick tour" of SA help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/… and to the tutorial help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/… – gotchula Jan 20 '11 at 4:55
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I've found Maguire's book to be very helpful. 

@book{Maguire2005,
    Author = {Maguire, D.J. and Batty, M. and Goodchild, M.F.},     
    Keywords = {GIS, UIS},
    Publisher = {ESRI, Redlands, CA},
    Title = {Gis spatial analysis and modelling},
    Year = {2005}}
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Thanks both, appreciate it. I'll check those out. I've looked at the help for things like splining, kriging, etc., and the math is really beyond me. – recurvata Jan 20 '11 at 17:32
That should be thanks all, the "2 Answers" threw me off. Thanks! – recurvata Jan 20 '11 at 17:39

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