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Mastering ArcGIS
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Mastering ArcGIS

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Philosophy

This text reflects the author's personal philosophies and prejudices developed from 8 years of teaching GIS at an engineering school.

    1. GIS is best learned by doing it, not by studying it. The laboratory is THE critical component of the course, and theory is best introduced sparingly and integrated with experience. Hence this book is heavy on experience and light on theory. Instructors who love teaching theory will probably find it necessary to supplement this book with one of the fine theoretical textbooks available.

    2. Independent work and projects are critical to learning GIS. This book includes a wealth of exercises in which the student must find solutions independently without a cookbook recipe of steps. A wise instructor will also require students to choose and carry out an independent research project.

    3. GIS analysis should be taught before GIS data development. Analysis is more interesting and easier to learn for the beginner. Creating general exercises for data development is also difficult because it generally requires additional software, which varies from organization to organization and never seems to work as seamlessly as one would hope. It also often requires using aspects of GIS not covered in the first semester, such as using a few steps of GRID to byteswap an image. The author has found that student projects go much better when students are encouraged to work mainly with data already in GIS format, and leave data management for later.

The book assumes that the student has access to ArcView 8.2 or ArcGIS Desktop 8.2 or higher. Many important GIS functions require the more expensive ArcEditor or ArcInfo licenses, but they are not covered in this text.