During the geospatial community of practice meeting, we discussed that there’s an urgent need to train ourselves on computer programming – especially on Python. I asked Robert Hijmans, our honorary CSI member (and the creator of WorldClim, GADM, and DIVA-GIS) to give a short crash course to our members, and he gratefully agreed!
In this 1.5-hr session, Robert presented us a list of compelling reasons to use programming approach to do the geospatial analysis work (not just using a point-and-click GIS software) and showed us how Python’s coding style is differ from (or similar to) other languages.
- Presentation: Robert Hijmans (UC Davis) 2017 – Getting Started with Programming for GIS (Sep 22)
- Sample code for exercise: dist.py
Additionally, Robert also shared his passion on R, another language wildly popular in the data analytics. You can learn more about how R is being used for spatial analysis at Spatial Data Analysis and Modeling with R, Robert’s another personal project.