Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82590 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-01
• Released on: 2005-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Lacks specific instructions
Although the book gives nice examples on ways to analyze spatial data, this ESRI book lacks specifics on how to do this in their base software or extensions. Documentation for CrimeStat by Ned Levine and Associates explains spatial analysis better, is free and is cited in this book. The documentation for CrimeStat is also better.

Great companion textbook
Spatial statistics can be a very cumbersome topic, but Mitchell goes through it in a good, linear fashion. I don't need to know the mathematics behind the statistical methods (although he provides them) I instead want to know when and how the tools are applied.

Even though this is an ESRI book, several of the topics he discusses are actually not available in ArcGIS. It also falls short of showing how to run any particular software package, but that makes it more universal for study with other software.

A great addition would be a tutorial workbook covering these topics.

esri does it again?
Due to ESRI's share of the GIS market, they assume that they have the midas touch when it comes to all things spatial. This book just about sucks. Yes, there are pretty pictures (in this case all from ArcGIS, go figure?) but that doesn't mean it's a masterpiece. The text is very diffucult to decipher. It reads more like a term paper reciting facts poorly; in fact it feels like the author resisted the urge to cut and paste from source publications by obfuscating the ideas with poor style and even poorer word choices. In the wrong hands a thesaurus can be a weapon. A weapon that destroys content. I really tried to read this book, but couldn't get past the first 20 pages. If you want to learn anything about advanced spatial statistics for instance, you should read the books that the author cites, not this book. OK, so what if you wanted to have this book around as a reference item to help you through a specific spatial analysis problem? The Table of Contents is no help at all and the index is pitiful. And once you've found the example you're looking for, it doesn't really show you how to do it, or why it's done for that matter, just an objective description of what it would look like in ArcGIS.

The only good idea behind this book is how it intermixes geographic examples. For instance, it shows urban geography problems side by side with biogeography problems. But again this suffers, mainly due to lay out problems. The visual illustrations seem to be at odds with the text. Oh BTW, the font is cumbersome and the spacing is confusing. There aren't any boxes that highlight important ideas or underlined phrases or shaded areas in the text, there is nothing in the layout to help you learn the material. I'm pretty sure this book was laid out in Word!

With this latest book, ESRI must be banking on those agencies and institutions that can afford to buy ESRI products in the first place, that have a standing order with the company to gobble up all things ESRI.