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

The Python Console


The Python Console is a wonderful instrument to explore and learn PyQGIS. It's available in every QGIS installation and can be opened by selecting the Python Console voice in the Plugins menu.

The Python Console is a dockable interface, and like all dockable interfaces, you can change its position inside QGIS or separate it. You can try moving the console by dragging and dropping it.

The console is shown in this screenshot:

As you can see, the console is composed of a button toolbar marked by the red box. The bigger Python Console is marked by the upper-right red box and is where all the command results are shown, and finally a bottom command line, marked by the bottom-right red box, is where you can edit commands. The default position of these graphical components can vary with QGIS version.

Here, we describe how to test code interactively and explore the PyQGIS classes. However, we will not explain all the possibilities of the Python Console. These are well documented and...