GIS Day 2014 - Learn some geo

It’s that special holiday we all look forward to this time of year, it’s GIS Day! Now please hold back your excitement. If you are a GIS pro, you are probably lounging around the house enjoying your holiday off. I’ll be hanging out at the LA County GIS Day event most of the day hoping that it’s not too cold and that there is an unlimited supply of coffee. Jack Dangermond is doing a keynote which should be pretty cool.

So for this GIS Day, I thought I would share a few resources for learning something Geo.

1. OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap is the community driven map. Check out the wiki and LearnOSM for more details and enjoy.

2. MapTime MapTime has really taken off and they provide more resources than I possible could. Check them out and keep an eye open for a local meetup in your area. I hear rumors an Inland Empire one may be started soon, I look forward to it. If I can help, let me know. My time is tight, but I can do something.

3. Pluralsight What? An online developer training site? Other than the fact I’m a big advocate of GIS pros learning how to do some programming, Pluralsight has a Google Maps API and Mapbox course that are worth checking out.

4. LocatePress This small publisher packs a punch with titles focused on geo. I have them all except for the PyQGIS book at the moment. The Geospatial Power Tools book is highly recommended.

5. ArcGIS for Developers If you work at all in Esri tech, you owe it to yourself to sign up for a free developer account and poke around. You get 50 free ArcGIS Online credits to use, which is good for some light analysis testing.

6. MapBox Mapbox is great for custom tiles and many more features. The JavaScript API is based on Leaflet and they have some good tutorials. Check out TileMill for some awesome tile customization fun.

7. CartoDB and Map Academy CartoDB is awesome. They are a great resource for creating effective map visualizations. When you really dig into the API, it’s pretty much PostGIS on the web.

8. Boundless Boundless provides an all-in-one package of GeoServer, PostGIS and OpenLayers goodness. This is a great resource if you want to try some open-source full-stack development.

9. Get Lat+Lon I keep this site bookmarked. How many times have you needed to get the lat/long of a location for your mapping needs and get it quickly. This has come in handy so many times.

10. ArcGIS Web Development Ok, ok. Shameless plug, but if you are getting into development web maps with ArcGIS or you want to learn, check out my book. It’s geared towards beginners with a little extras thrown in. Manning has some other titles I would recommend. PostGIS In Action and Geoprocessing with Python. And because it’s GIS Day, you could save half off using code dotd111914au.

11. QGIS It was pointed out to me I missed a star resource, which is QGIS. This is an open-source desktop GIS tool. It can hook into all kinds of databases and create some wonderful maps. It’s pretty extensive and powerful, so look at the docs for more info and check out Learning QGIS 2.0 and The Geospatial Desktop.

This is by no means an exhaustive list off all things geo. If you have any other recommendations, please share or forward them my way. As I mentioned, for a more in-depth list of resources, check out the MapTime resources page.