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 2. Viewing Spatial Data

In this chapter, we will cover how to view spatial data from different data sources. QGIS supports many file and database formats as well as standardized Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services. We will first cover how we can load layers from these different data sources. We will then look into the basics of styling both vector and raster layers and will create our first map, which you can see in the following screenshot:

We will finish this chapter with an example of loading background maps from online services.

Note

For the examples in this chapter, we will use the sample data provided by the QGIS project, which is available for download from http://qgis.org/downloads/data/qgis_sample_data.zip (21 MB). Download and unzip it.