Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By : Anita Graser
Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By: Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Learning QGIS Third Edition is a practical, hands-on guide updated for QGIS 2.14 that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Through clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS quickly and painlessly. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS to handling spatial data to creating great maps. You will learn how to load and visualize existing spatial data and create data from scratch. You will get to know important plugins, perform common geoprocessing and spatial analysis tasks and automate them with Processing. We will cover how to achieve great cartographic output and print maps. Finally, you will learn how to extend QGIS using Python and even create your own plugin.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Learning QGIS Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Extending QGIS with Python

This chapter is an introduction to scripting QGIS with Python. Of course, a full-blown Python tutorial would be out of scope for this book. The examples here therefore assume a minimum proficiency of working with Python. Python is a very accessible programming language even if you are just getting started, and it has gained a lot of popularity in both the open source and proprietary GIS world, for example, ESRI's ArcPy or PyQGIS. QGIS currently supports Python 2.7, but there are plans to support Python 3 in the upcoming QGIS 3.x series. We will start with an introduction to actions and then move on to the QGIS Python Console, before we go into more advanced development of custom tools for the Processing Toolbox and an explanation of how to create our own plugins.