Geoprocessing-with-Python.pdf

Although I’d taken a lot of programming classes in college, I never fully appreciated programming until I had a job that involved a lot of repetitive tasks. After amusing myself by automating much of that job, I decided to return to school and study biol- ogy, which is when I took my first GIS course. I was instantly in love, and managed to convince someone to give me a biology degree for writing an extension for ArcView GIS (a precursor to A rc GIS , for you Esri fans out there). After finishing that up, I went to work for the Remote Sensing/Geographic Information Systems Laboratory at Utah State University. One of my first projects involved some web mapping, and I soon became a big fan of the open source UMN M ap S erver software. That was my introduc- tion to open source geospatial software, including GDAL . I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate the power of the GDAL/OGR library when I first learned about it, but I came to my senses once I started using it in my C++ and C# code. In the College of Natural Resources, there weren’t many people around who were interested in coding, but I did get to point people to the GDAL command-line utilities on a regular basis. But then Esri introduced Python as the scripting language of choice for A rc GIS , and things started to change. I don’t think I had used Python much before then, but playing with arcgisscripting (the original Esri Python module) made me realize how much I enjoyed working with Python, so naturally I had to start using GDAL with it as well. More importantly for this book, my coworker John Lowry suggested that we team- teach a Python-for- GIS class. He taught students how to use Python with A rc GIS , and I taught them about GDAL . The class turned out to be popular, so we taught it that way for another few years until John moved away. I took over the entire class and have been teaching it in various configurations ever since. I’ve never bothered to take the class material from the first two y