Lawhead - QGIS Python Programming Cookbook

Joel Lawhead is a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of NVisionSolutions Inc., an award-winning firm that specializes in geospatial technology integration and sensor engineering.

Joel began using Python in 1997 and began combining it with geospatial software development in 2000. He is the author of Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python , Packt Publishing . His Python cookbook recipes were featured in two editions of Python Cookbook , O'Reilly Media . He is also the developer of the widely used, open source Python Shapefile Library (PyShp) and maintains the geospatial technical blog GeospatialPython.com and the Twitter feed @SpatialPython, which discuss the use of the Python programming language within the geospatial industry.

In 2011, Joel reverse engineered and published the undocumented shapefile spatial indexing format and assisted fellow geospatial Python developer, Marc Pfister, in reversing the algorithm used, allowing developers around the world to create better-integrated and more robust geospatial applications involving shapefiles.

Joel served as the lead architect, project manager, and co-developer for geospatial applications used by US government agencies, including NASA, FEMA, NOAA, the US Navy, and many other commercial and non-profit organizations. In 2002, he received the international Esri Special Achievement in GIS award for his work on the Real-Time Emergency Action Coordination Tool (REACT), for emergency management using geospatial analysis.

I would like to acknowledge my beautiful family, including my wife, Julie, and four children, Lauren, Will, Lillie, and Lainie, who allowed me to write yet another book in our limited collective free time. I would also like to acknowledge my employers and coworkers at NVisionSolutions.com, a bright team of people dedicated to working together at the exciting bleeding edge of geospatial technology.

Joshua Arnott is an environmental scientist with four years of academic and consultancy experience. His expertise lies in environmental modeling, with a focus on hydrology and geoinformatics. He has contributed to a number of GIS-related open source projects, including QGIS and Shapely. He maintains a blog about programming and GIS at snorfalorpagus.net, and he likes cats just as much as everyone else on the Internet.

Giuseppe De Marco was born in 1973 in Ferentino, Italy. He has a high school certificate in humanities and attained a bachelor's degree in agriculture from the University of Pisa. When he was a small boy, he began to use computers and learn programming languages (BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, and so on). At the university, he began to encounter open source software and the Linux OS, and he developed a deep interest in geography and GIS and other programming languages, such as C++ and Python, by first getting in touch with Esri commercial products and later with GRASS and QGIS. Since the QGIS 1.7.4 release, he's been developing plugins for this software, sometimes purely to seek knowledge and at other times for work. In 2008, he began a professional partnership with two colleagues called Pienocampo (open field), and his plugins are hosted on Pienocampo's website and on the QGIS official repository. At the moment, he lives in his hometown Ferentino and works as a freelance agriculture engineer. His work activities include studying geography, surveying, tree risk assessment, landscaping, bioengineering, and farm consulting. In 2014, he also began to teach other colleagues how to use QGIS and other open source software.

I would like to thank my wife, Fabiola; my little daughter, Anna; my mother, Angela; and my colleagues, Marco De Castris, Ettore Arcangeletti, Luca Grande, and Ivan Solinas.

Jonathan Gross is the author of the Open Source GIS blog, http://opensourcegisblog.blogspot.com/. He has a master's of public health degree in epidemiology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a graduate certificate in geographic information systems from Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs. He has done graduate coursework in Python and uses Python for programming small tasks. He is currently an epidemiologist at the Baltimore City Health Department, Maryland, where he performs spatial analysis on health and crime data.

Luigi Pirelli is a freelance software analyst and developer with a honors degree in computer science from the University of Bari.

He has worked for 15 years in satellite ground segmentation and direct ingestion systems for the European Space Agency. Since 2006, he has been involved in the GFOSS world, contributing to QGIS, GRASS, and the MapServer core, and developing and maintaining many QGIS plugins. He actively participates in QGIS Hackmeetings.

He is the founder of the OSGEO Italian local chapter GFOSS.it and now lives in Spain, where he contributes to the GFOSS community. During the past few years, he started teaching PyQGIS by organizing trainings, from basic to advanced level, supporting companies to develop their specific QGIS plugins.

He has coauthored Mastering QGIS , Packt Publishing .

He is the founder of the local hackerspace group, Bricolabs.cc that is focused on all things related to open source hardware. He likes to cycle, repair everything, and train groups on conflict resolution.

Other than this book, he has also contributed to the guide, Cycling Italy , Lonely Planet .

A special thanks to the QGIS developer community and core developers because the project is managed in an open way, allowing contribution from everyone.