Exploring Spatial Analysis in GIS

Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners or experts
Review: This book is unique in covering a wide range of spatial analysis methods: single layer operations, multiple layer operations, point pattern analysis, network analysis, "spatial modelling," surface analysis, grid analysis, and decision making.

As an overview for those who know some parts of spatial analysis and want a sense of the gaps in their knowledge, this book is good to skim through. Others will be better off looking elsewhere, because the material is of inconsistent quality and of varying difficulty, and none of it goes very deeply into the subject.

Some of the sections include dubious examples. The material on multiple and logistic regression, for example, presents a poor technique for selecting significant independent variables and for constructing a linear model. The author even points out elsewhere that the model should be re-estimated after removing insignificant terms, but he does not do that in his examples.

The book tends to introduce mathematical formulas within introductory material, but the formulas obscure the exposition, except for the expert reader, who will already be too advanced for this book anyway. See the section on spatial autocorrelation for an example.

The discussions vary. Where they succeed, the beginner can learn a lot in just a few pages. But where they fail--and it's sometimes hard to tell the difference--they fail very badly. For example, the section on kriging is so opaque and incomplete that nobody new to the subject could possibly understand what it is about. The unusual and ugly mathematical typesetting does not help.

The book is crudely made, with low-resolution copies of small diagrams, little text per page (thereby expanding the page count), and black-and-white or grayscale figures throughout. The diagrams are often not helpful or clear.

It is very difficult to write about this subject. The audience is so varied and the material covers such a wide range that it is hard to be consistently appealing to many readers. This book is a noble but ultimately severely flawed effort; a good introductory book on spatial analysis remains to be written.

Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners or experts
Review: This book is unique in covering a wide range of spatial analysis methods: single layer operations, multiple layer operations, point pattern analysis, network analysis, "spatial modelling," surface analysis, grid analysis, and decision making.

As an overview for those who know some parts of spatial analysis and want a sense of the gaps in their knowledge, this book is good to skim through. Others will be better off looking elsewhere, because the material is of inconsistent quality and of varying difficulty, and none of it goes very deeply into the subject.

Some of the sections include dubious examples. The material on multiple and logistic regression, for example, presents a poor technique for selecting significant independent variables and for constructing a linear model. The author even points out elsewhere that the model should be re-estimated after removing insignificant terms, but he does not do that in his examples.

The book tends to introduce mathematical formulas within introductory material, but the formulas obscure the exposition, except for the expert reader, who will already be too advanced for this book anyway. See the section on spatial autocorrelation for an example.

The discussions vary. Where they succeed, the beginner can learn a lot in just a few pages. But where they fail--and it's sometimes hard to tell the difference--they fail very badly. For example, the section on kriging is so opaque and incomplete that nobody new to the subject could possibly understand what it is about. The unusual and ugly mathematical typesetting does not help.

The book is crudely made, with low-resolution copies of small diagrams, little text per page (thereby expanding the page count), and black-and-white or grayscale figures throughout. The diagrams are often not helpful or clear.

It is very difficult to write about this subject. The audience is so varied and the material covers such a wide range that it is hard to be consistently appealing to many readers. This book is a noble but ultimately severely flawed effort; a good introductory book on spatial analysis remains to be written.