Preface

Although I’d taken a lot of programming classes in college, I never fully appreciated programming until I had a job that involved a lot of repetitive tasks. After amusing myself by automating much of that job, I decided to return to school and study biology, which is when I took my first GIS course. I was instantly in love, and managed to convince someone to give me a biology degree for writing an extension for ArcView GIS (a precursor to ArcGIS, for you Esri fans out there). After finishing that up, I went to work for the Remote Sensing/Geographic Information Systems Laboratory at Utah State University. One of my first projects involved some web mapping, and I soon became a big fan of the open source UMN MapServer software. That was my introduction to open source geospatial software, including GDAL.

I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate the power of the GDAL/OGR library when I first learned about it, but I came to my senses once I started using it in my C++ and C# code. In the College of Natural Resources, there weren’t many people around who were interested in coding, but I did get to point people to the GDAL command-line utilities on a regular basis. But then Esri introduced Python as the scripting language of choice for ArcGIS, and things started to change. I don’t think I had used Python much before then, but playing with arcgisscripting (the original Esri Python module) made me realize how much I enjoyed working with Python, so naturally I had to start using GDAL with it as well.

More importantly for this book, my coworker John Lowry suggested that we team-teach a Python-for-GIS class. He taught students how to use Python with ArcGIS, and I taught them about GDAL. The class turned out to be popular, so we taught it that way for another few years until John moved away. I took over the entire class and have been teaching it in various configurations ever since. I’ve never bothered to take the class material from the first two years off the web, however, which is how Manning found me. They asked if I would write a book on using GDAL with Python. I’d never had the desire to write a book, so it took a bit of persuasion to convince me to do it. In the end, it was my love for teaching that won me over. I’ve discovered over the years that I really enjoy teaching, mostly because I love watching students incorporate what they’re learning into the rest of their work. This is especially true of graduate students, some of whom might not have completed their research in a timely manner (or at all) if they hadn’t learned how to write code. I know that these skills will continue to assist them throughout their careers, and my hope is that this book will provide the same help to you, no matter if you’re a student, professional, or a hobbyist. This is fun stuff, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!