The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), which includes OGR, is critical to many of the examples in this book and is also one of the more complicated Python setups. For these reasons, we'll discuss it separately here. The latest GDAL bindings are available on PyPI; however, the installation requires a few more steps because of additional resources that are needed by the GDAL library.
There are three ways to install GDAL for use with Python. You can use any one of them:
- Compile it from the source code.
- Install it as part of a larger software package.
- Install a binary distribution and then the Python bindings.
If you have experience with compiling C libraries as well as the required compiler software, then the first option gives you the most control. However, it is not recommended if you just want to get going as quickly as possible, because even experienced...