Chapter 1, Preparing to Build Your Own GIS Application, talks about the benefits of developing a custom geospatial application and describes how to set up your development environment, and create your application folder structure.

Chapter 2, Accessing Geodata, implements the crucial data loading and saving capabilities of your application for both vector and raster data.

Chapter 3, Designing the Visual Look of Our Application, creates and puts together the basic building blocks of your application's user interface, giving you a first look at what your application will look like.

Chapter 4, Rendering Our Geodata, adds rendering capabilities so that the user can interactively view, zoom, and pan data inside the application.

Chapter 5, Managing and Organizing Geographic Data, creates a basic functionality for splitting, merging, and cleaning both the vector and raster data.

Chapter 6, Analyzing Geographic Data, develops basic analysis functionality, such as overlay statistics, for vector and raster data.

Chapter 7, Packaging and Distributing Your Application, wraps it all up by showing you how to share and distribute your application, so it is easier for you or others to use it.

Chapter 8, Looking Forward, considers how you may wish to proceed to further build on, customize, and extend your basic application into something more elaborate or specialized in whichever way you want.

There are no real requirements for this book. However, to keep the book short and sweet, the instructions assume that you have a Windows operating system. If you are on Mac OS X or Linux, you should still be able create and run the application, but then you will have to figure out the equivalent installation instructions for your operating system. You may be forced to deal with compiling C++ code and face the potential of unexpected errors. All other installations will be covered throughout the book, including which Python version to use.

This book is ideal for Python programmers and software developers who are tasked with or wish to make a customizable special-purpose GIS application, or are interested in expanding their knowledge of working with spatial data cleaning, analysis, or map visualization. Analysts, political scientists, geographers, and GIS specialists seeking a creative platform to experiment with cutting-edge spatial analysis, but are still only beginners in Python, will also find this book beneficial. Familiarity with Tkinter application development in Python is preferable but not mandatory.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Download the Shapely wheel file that fits our system, looking something like Shapely‑1.5.7‑cp27‑none‑win32.whl."

A block of code is set as follows:

class LayerGroup:
    def __init__(self):
        self.layers = list()
        self.connected_maps = list()

    def __iter__(self):
        for layer in self.layers:
            yield layer

    def add_layer(self, layer):
        self.layers.append(layer)

    def move_layer(self, from_pos, to_pos):
        layer = self.layers.pop(from_pos)
        self.layers.insert(to_pos, layer)

    def remove_layer(self, position):
        self.layers.pop(position)

    def get_position(self, layer):
        return self.layers.index(layer)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

>>> import PIL, PIL.Image
>>> img = PIL.Image.open("your/path/to/icon.png")
>>> img.save("your/path/to/pythongis/app/icon.ico", sizes=[(255,255),(128,128),(64,64),(48,48),(32,32),(16,16),(8,8)])

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Inno Setup link on the left side."

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