Preface
Welcome to QGIS By Example. This book will help you understand the capabilities of QGIS, show you how to work with spatial data and perform the most common analyses, and bring your productivity to a new level with the Processing framework.
QGIS is a very popular and user-friendly open source desktop GIS. It provides many useful capabilities and features and their number is continuously growing. It supports a wide range of raster and vector formats, as well as databases and OGC services. It also integrates seamlessly with other FOSSGIS applications. More and more users all over the world choose QGIS as their primary GIS software.
The book will introduce QGIS 2.8.x, and show you how to properly prepare your data for comfortable work, design beautiful maps, and share them with others. It will also show you how to perform different types of analysis and interpret their results. In the final chapters, you will learn how to become more productive by automating repetitive tasks with the QGIS Processing framework, and how to extend the QGIS functionality by developing a Python plugin.