Worth the money !

As the prior 3 reviewers note, this is a useful and interesting book. I applaud its emphasis on spatial analysis/data manipulation rather than clever map production (although there's some of that too). I especially like the extended project involving stops on a San Francisco bus route and the extraction of census data for buffers around such points. Obviously with a little thought the techniques discussed can easily be translated to develop a trading-area analysis, as retail-store site analysts do, or to develop more sophisticated econometric or appraisal analyses than are commonly seen. The progression of topics, from automating/generalizing/pythonizing an ESRI workflow to more advanced python tasks is also nicely done.Full disclosure: Packt invited me to review this work and provided the e-book I used.

this book requirement for Automation Geospatial Analysis project.I Love it.

Silas Toms book on Arcpy and ArcGIS scripting is a very comprehensive introduction to Python in the ArcGIS environment. The book starts out with the basics of Python (data types, iteration, concepts). I also like that he talks about the PYTHONPATH, the Python interpreter and what happens under the hood when a script is ran. This is an important concept that seems to be often overlooked in ArcGIS Python scripting books.After covering the basics and important background information, the book dives right into some of the ArcPy functionality with some of the geoprocessing tools and onto more advanced concepts such as cursors. One thing that I like before getting too deep into ArcGIS scripting, the author introduces some best practices and pushes the use of functions for code reusability. The author discusses how create and pass in parameters into custom functions and makes good use of doc strings.After introducing cursors, the book covers an important concept that seems to be lacking in other ArcGIS books which is working with geometry objects. This can allow for creating features programmatically with full control and the class methods allow for powerful spatial analysis. There is another section on advanced geometry methods later in the book.Next, the book moves into creating script tools. This is a really nice section that introduces ArcGIS’s built-in framework for turning Python scripts into fully functional toolbox tools with the same familiar GUI. Parameter types are discussed as well as how to pass the parameters from the user input via the script tool interface into the script for execution. One thing I feel that was missing from this section was information on the Tool Validator Class. This is a key piece of making script tools and I feel this section would be stronger if this piece were included.Another important ArcGIS scripting element included in this book is map automation using the arcpy.mapping module. Important time saving concepts are covered here such as fixing broken data links, updating map surround elements, layers, and exporting maps. One important piece that these chapters drive home is the use of objects and Object Oriented Programming. This feeds in nicely to the next chapter on advanced geometry methods and wraps up how to use objects very nicely in my opinion. Creating custom Python packages are also discussed here which is helpful when maintaining your own custom libraries.Chapter 11 covers some basic operations in the Network Analyst and Spatial Analyst extensions available in ArcGIS. This chapter shows how to check licenses in and out and some of the important concepts to understand before using the extensions (such as how to set up a Network Dataset). Practical examples are used to extract elevation information at bus stop locations.The final chapter is a nice wrap up of all the content discussed in the book. The author also shows some miscellaneous tricks and tips that can make life easier in the ArcGIS scripting environment. At this point the author tells the reader that they are ready to explore more on their own. Overall, I think this book is an excellent place to start and even a good reference for seasoned Python programmers in an ArcGIS environment. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Python scripting in ArcGIS!

The first three chapters give you a brief overview of Python as a scripting language and walk you through the initial Python and ArcGIS setup. It doesn’t go deep into the language but it will be enough to understand the initial scripts. The Python setup is targeted to Windows users. I’m a Mac user and it was not difficult to convert the examples to make them work on a Mac, I do have previous experience with Python though. ArcGIS is also available for Mac. I used the desktop version.Chapter 5 introduces the use of cursors and the basic geometry types. If you have previous experience with SQL you will find it very familiar. It was easy to follow the examples. I wish the author had provided the source code with color highlighting (in the ebook version at least). That would have improved the readability of the examples. The illustrations are full color and nice though.In chapter 6 we learn about ArcPy objects. There is a very nice example that get the population for an intersection of two areas. It shows nicely that there are are several geometry operations that we can use with ArcPy objects.I found the chapter of Network Analyst the most interesting of the book.I always wanted to know how to model bus routes. This chapter has a nice example of how this is done using an extension of ArcGIS. It was a lot of fun to play with this script to calculate different routes.The last chapter completes the population by bus stop example we’ve been working through the book. It is a nice conclusion.As an introductory book to ArcGIS I found this book very interesting.A have a minor complain about the source code formatting and color highlighting, which in some examples was hard to read and make it difficult to copy and paste. That's not a big deal since you have the source files available in the website anyway.