Getting to Know ArcView GIS at Dominant Systems Book Store

"A great educational breakthrough the highest value today in desktop GIS educational material." -- Susan Elshaw Thrall, GeoInfo Systems magazine

"This is a wonderful book--ideal for neophytes and professionals alike." -- Dr. Bruce Davis, Author GIS: A Visual Approach

Customer Reviews & Comments
I have repeatedly used this book as the first text in an ArcView-based university course on GIS. The book uses realistic problems and settings to illustrate, step-by-step, how ArcView can be used to solve the problems and perform the needed analyses. In so doing, it serves as a good introduction to vector data analysis. The detailed illustrations and sample software (a CD with a version of ArcView restricted to the data on the CD) enable anybody to follow through this book and work at their leisure. The text is somewhere at a junior high school level in terms of what it assumes, but it is in no way patronizing or simplistic: even graduate students have found it useful. Sometimes follow-on analyses are suggested or sketched, but no problems are given. This is a pity, because students need additional problems to reinforce what they have just learned. Once you work through all the steps that are shown, there's nothing much else left to do. In a few cases, the suggested analytical method is deficient. For example, in an early chapter students are shown how to site a soccer field within an open space--but the solution they derive is incorrect because the features are not projected! Other than these few deficiencies, the book is accurate and free of mistakes. This book covers only the basic capabilities of ArcView, although at the end it briefly describes raster analysis (Spatial Analyst) and network analysis (Network Analyst). The good design, attention to detail, and experience with GIS as well as with the software let this book rise above many others of its genre.

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