Chapter 1. A Refreshing Look at QGIS
QGIS is a volunteer-led development project licensed under the GNU General Public License. It was started by Gary Sherman in 2002. The project was incubated with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) in 2007. Version 1.0 was released in 2009. At the time of writing this book, QGIS 2.6 was the stable version and new versions are released every four months.
In this chapter we will review the basic functionality of QGIS, which will be assumed knowledge for the remaining chapters in this book. If you need a refresher on QGIS or a quick-start guide to QGIS, you should read this chapter. The topics we will cover in this chapter are as follows:
- Downloading QGIS and its installation
- The QGIS graphical user interface
- Loading data
- Working with coordinate reference systems
- Working with tables
- Editing data
- Styling data
- Composing a map
- Finding and installing plugins
