Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing third-party Python modules


We'll make a distinction between modules which are included as part of Python's standard library and modules which must be installed. In Python, the words module and library are used interchangeably. To install libraries, you either get them from the Python Package Index (PyPI) or in the case of a lot of geospatial modules, you download a specialized installer. PyPI acts as the official software repository for libraries and offers some easy-to-use setup programs, which simplify installing packages. You can use the easy_install program, which is especially good on Windows, or the pip program more commonly found on Linux and Unix systems. Once it's installed, you can then install third-party packages simply by running the following code:

easy_install <package name>

For installing pip, you run the following code:

pip install <package name>

Links will be provided to installers and instructions for packages not available on PyPI. You can manually...