Preface

The book starts with a background on geospatial analysis, offers a flow of techniques and technology used, and splits the field into its component specialty areas, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. The focus of the book is to lay a strong foundation in using the powerful Python language and framework in order to approach geospatial analysis effectively. In doing so, we'll focus on using pure Python as well as certain Python tools and APIs, and using generic algorithms. The readers will be able to analyze various forms of geospatial data that comes in and learn real-time data tracking and how to apply this to interesting scenarios.

While many third-party geospatial libraries are used throughout the examples, a special effort will made by us to use pure Python, with no dependencies, whenever possible. This focus on pure Python 3 examples is what will set this book apart from nearly all other information in this field. This book may be the only geospatial book using Python 3 on the market currently. We will also go through some popular libraries that weren't in the previous version of the book.