Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By : Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP
Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By: Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP

Overview of this book

QGIS is an open source solution to GIS. It is widely used by GIS professionals all over the world. It is the leading alternative to the proprietary GIS software. Although QGIS is described as intuitive, it is also by default complex. Knowing which tools to use and how to apply them is essential to producing valuable deliverables on time. Starting with a refresher on the QGIS basics, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom QGIS plugin. From the refresher, we will recap how to create, populate, and manage a spatial database. You’ll also walk through styling GIS data, from creating custom symbols and color ramps to using blending modes. In the next section, you will discover how to prepare vector, heat maps, and create live layer effects, labeling, and raster data for processing. You’ll also discover advanced data creation and editing techniques. The last third of the book covers the more technical aspects of QGIS such as using LAStools and GRASS GIS’s integration with the Processing Toolbox, how to automate workflows with batch processing, and how to create graphical models. Finally, you will see how to create and run Python data processing scripts and write your own QGIS plugin with pyqgis. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of QGIS, and will be ready to use it for any type of GIS work.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering QGIS - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter provided you with the steps to handle databases in QGIS. While QGIS can handle multiple databases, we used SpatiaLite as it provides a good amount of functionality with little overhead or administration.

Using the DB Manager you can perform a number of operations on databases. Operations of note are: creating indices, spatial and aspatial views, importing and exporting, and performing queries. From the introduction to DB Manager and SpatiaLite in this chapter, you are now well equipped to write more complex queries that take full advantage of the SQL commands and SpatiaLite SQL extension commands. A full listing of SQLite SQL commands is available at http://www.sqlite.org/lang.html. A full listing of the SpatialLite SQL extension commands is available at http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-sql-4.2.0.html.

The next chapter moves us from the storage of geospatial data to the display of geospatial data. The styling capabilities of QGIS will be covered for both vector...