Python Geospatial Development, full review

Erik Westra did an excellent job here: delivering a book that is both comprehensive and easy to read. Of course you already need to know a bit of Python to start, but all topics are explained very well and the book is very hands-on and task oriented.

The integration of Google maps in almost everything from telephone directories to pizza ordering services and on-line news services shows that there is a huge appeal to providing relevant geographical information in all sorts of contexts. But where do you start if you want to develop such functionality in Python? This book is certainly an excellent starting point.

Erik covers basically any subject from necessary geometrical concepts like units, datums and projections, just to get you started, to where to get the needed Python libraries and more importantly where to source good basic data like maps, positions of cities, shapes of countries and shorelines, etc, preferably from free sources. As geographical information used to be hard to get and often expensive, this attention to data sources is a very valuable part of the book. I particularly liked his extensive coverage of the collaborative openstreetmap project, an extensive source of geographical data collected by a host of people around the world.

With these resources at hand the next steps are directed to manipulating geospatial data and generating all sorts of maps. The storage of data in databases with specific geospatial extensions to handle large datasets is covered in depth with specific examples for PostGIS, MySQL ans Sqlite. Also the rendering of maps is explained in a detailed manner focusing on the Mapnik library. The final part of the book is dedicated to developing a web application to work interactively with map data. As performance is a key issue when working with large maps, even the implementation of a caching tile server (a server that generates small parts of a map on demand as you browse and zoom over the map) is implemented and explained in detail.

All in all a near perfect book for everybody who wants to start developing map based applications. Its solid coverage, excellent reference material and detailed explanations certainly make it a five out five for me.