A Level Text in GIS

Friday, 30 January, 2009

With the inclusion of GIS in the A-level syllabus it wasn’t going to be long before a textbook arrived on the market and low and behold the Geographical Association have the imaginatively named GIS for A-level geography listed (and earlier noted by Steven Feldman). It isn’t published yet and doesn’t show up on Amazon, but is obviously “in the wings”. The Table of Contents seem standard fare, but perhaps the most interesting thing is that it is produced in collaboration with ESRI and comes with a (UK) licensed version of ArcView 9.2. This is a very clever tie up and is similar to Microsoft’s “hearts and minds” approach to virtually giving away Office to students. If people are trained at school (for free) then businesses often follow suit. Of course it remains to be asked where Cadcorp and MapInfo, amongst others, are in this brave new world. Indeed it would be nice to see people from the open source community help deliver something. With QGIS reaching version 1 status I think it would be an ideal candidate. Time will tell.

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