Geographic Information Systems in Action

Preface

Geographic information systems (GIS) have been growing immensely, especially in the past 20 years. A major response to that growth is the development of an ever-growing list of textbooks and learning materials. The textbooks, including my own Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems, have largely targeted an intellectual university undergraduate and graduate student audience. This audience may or may not actually apply the tools of the GIS, using it instead perhaps to manage GIS operations or for later PhD work and eventually teaching it. This unfortunately leaves behind the largest growth market in GIS, that of the community college student, who is much more likely to immediately apply the skills learned in a GIS course. This text is aimed at this growth market.

Community college students, the primary audience for this text, are pragmatic, practical, and impatient with nonrelevant course material. They go to community colleges expecting to gain not just factual and conceptual knowledge but also skills that can be applied immediately. If, however, students learn the skills but lack a basic understanding of the concepts behind the GIS toolkit (as occurs when they use many of the cookbook-style laboratory assignments currently available, even those from the major GIS companies), they will perform tasks only mechanically with little concern for or understanding of the reliability or validity of the result.

GIS in Action aims to overcome these shortcomings for community ...