Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

This book is well organized and easy to follow and the accompanying CD is very helpful. There are so few books in this subject at present; I recommend this book to students.

After working through all of the chapters and examples I decided to increase my rating from four to five stars -- now after reviewing David W. Allen's "GIS Tutorial for Python Scripting" I placed it back at four stars. The book's target audience is GIS professionals who "wish to revolutionize their ArcGIS workflow with Python." To this end it provides explanations and examples of the essential building blocks to automate various tasks. For me it was good practice and I did learn some new things. I believe the author's stated purpose is accomplished with this book. Other reviewers have been unduly harsh because their expectations were too high. If you are experienced with ArcGIS but inexperienced with Python or knowledgeable about Python but relatively new to ArcGIS then I believe this book should be useful to you, but not necessarily the one you should buy -- for that check out David W. Allen's "GIS Tutorial for Python Scripting" (ESRI Press, 2014). The explanations are clear and understandable and the examples satisfactory. Chapter by chapter the author presents essential building blocks of concepts, principles and examples. In Chapter 7 and beyond the material and examples are more sophisticated so the reader progressively deepens their knowledge and toolset. Some reviewers have complained about the book's numerous errata at the publisher's website and I agree it is annoying. The mistakes and typos are mostly minor and pertain to code examples -- I don't think they were excessive and for many technical books with some publishers there are bound to be some mistakes. It was a useful challenge correcting those problems not identified by the errata at the publisher's website. Not mentioned is that some of the maps used in several chapters will open with broken data links but this is for the purpose of using arcpy.mapping capabilities to fix the broken links. Perhaps the most serious deficiency of the book is the amount of attention given to the arcpy.mapping module -- there are a more limited number of examples for the other modules available with Python (for example, the data access module is covered in Chapter 10) so keep in mind this book is a starting point and not a comprehensive introduction to Python and ArcGIS. There are many other books solely on Python -- for example, the excellent "Python Cookbook" mentioned by at least one other reviewer -- but currently there is a scarcity of books on Python and ArcGIS. One good book that is available right now is Paul A. Zandbergen's "Python Scripting for ArcGIS" (2013) from ESRI Press which I also own. Both the Zandbergen and Pimpler books are good introductions to Python scripting with ArcGIS. The Zandbergen book is excellent and the more sophisticated of the two. If you are looking to buy just one of these books then the Zandbergen book will provide a solid introduction but also enable you to get a trial version of ArcGIS software -- a great buy if you need the software. The Zandbergen book offers a more in-depth introduction to using Python with ArcGIS. Forthcoming in the summer of 2014 are more books on Python and ArcGIS from several publishers including ESRI Press. I especially recommend that you check out the book by David W. Allen from ESRI Press -- he usually writes excellent books.

This book is an extremely basic introduction to the ArcGIS 10.1 ArcPy module, with a few minor additions whose link to ArcGIS (or to GIS at all) is tenuous (sending emails? Really? And the first chapter is a generic intro to python, better covered in dozens of other dedicated resources). The "recipes" are almost all single ArcPy methods demonstrated; those seeking interesting problems and novel solutions (like the aging, but excellent "Python Cookbook") will be sorely disappointed. No real-world problems are discussed - the output from many (most?) recipes is print statements, hardly useful for much more than toy problems. On the plus side, the examples are clearer and more consistent in style than many of ESRI's own, particularly with the consistent use of the "with" statement that leads to much clearer and easier to debug code. But the chosen book structure makes several sections highly repetitive - a method is demostrated in one recipe, and then the next virtually repeats the entire thing to add an SQL query. There's also some questionable advice, like explicitly telling readers to issue "import arcpy" even in the ArcMap python console "as a good habit"; perhaps it would be good to understand the context in which you're issuing commands? The dumb insistance on this does allow the author to pad out each and every example though, because he includes it even when it's entirely un-needed. And this is not the only use of unnecessary/pointless import statements - many recipes import the "os" module and then never use it, which is hardly good style (though to be fair, ESRI documentation and training teaches similar crappy habits). If you're looking for interesting problems with practical solutions and a deep discussion of alternatives (like the "Python Cookbook") you'll be very disappointed. If this is a cookbook, it's of the "cheese on toast" variety. Only worth it for the absolute beginner - even as someone who'd never used 10.1 before, though who has a reasonable amount of experience with python and previous ArcGIS versions, I learned more from 5 minutes with the help files. Money wasted.

If you're an ArcGIS user looking to expand your skillset, you'll probably end up purchasing this book because there are not many other options out there. As someone new to Python but not new to programming, I was sorely disappointed with this book. If you are new to Python, do not start with this book, but with one of the O'Reilly (like Python Cookbook) versions. It will explain much more about the structure of Python, which is sorely missing in this intro book. The author sets you off on examples without explaining many of the fundamental basics. Python is highly sensitive to indents. Unfortunately, that is glossed over, which provided me a lot of difficulty in writing my independent Python code until I used another intro book. Also extremely unfortunately, almost every example in this book has at least one errata, frequently in the indents. I found this quite frustrating and detrimental to my learning - I ended up spending a lot of time fiddling the the examples to get them to work, then trying to remember which change actually fixed the code. It didn't cover things like importing csv or XML data with headers, which is the majority of the data I see. It's a lot to expect that a novice Python programmer would figure out the correct code to import one line as the header, then the rest of the text as data. (thank you, Stack Overflow) I also wish it had an appendix list of all the items that arcpy could call. That would've made it very useful, because I haven't found a resource like that, and usually end up doing a lot of hunting around in help and other user programs to find the element name that I need. Most helpful was the section on layout design, assuming you want to publish to a png or pdf (or other image file). There is no instruction about how to generate mapbooks, georeferenced PDFs, or any sort of active layer that can easily be imported into an on-line system. Downloading data from a FTP site was also interesting, though you'd have to have a good sense of what was already contained in the data file before it would be a process that would be automated via Python.

Very good book for Python programmers, with a lot of "cookbook" recipes to use. This book corroborated with the ArcGIS Resource Center online helped me relearn and create a script for automating a county parcel layer. Good job, Eric!

Pros: Excellent Book Cons: Had to convert MXD's to 10.0 compatible version because they are meant for 10.1. Other than that. No concerns!

First and foremost, I have to concede, Packt Publishing recently provided a copy of Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook to review. Packt provided a copy free of change in exchange for a review on my website. To their credit, there were no expectations or strings attached. I can say whatever I want about the book. I wish the Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook had been around when I started attempting to flounder with Python a couple of years ago. The Python Cookbook presents Python scripting as a way for GIS jocks to get stuff done efficiently. The starting point for solutions is ArcGIS for Desktop, typically ArcMap. If you want to get into complex solutions, this is not the place to find them. It is however, a great starting point to get the foundation to start figuring out the path toward these more complex solutions. This makes the Python Cookbook a perfect starting point for a GIS jock who knows nothing about Python, but wants to be able to work smarter, and not harder.

I agree that the "cookbook" part of the title is a bit of a misnomer. However, it does include very helpful scripts which take advantage of ArcGIS 10 features. What I find most useful is the fact that the organization of the book takes a building block approach which is helpful for someone who may need to get started, and equally so for someone who would like to simply pinpoint and extract what they want and need. Here are some of the useful features: * automated map production and printing: can automate the production of map production and printing (including exporting PDFs), which is helpful when creating a set of maps or map files. * quickly using geoprocessing tools: this is a quick way to increase functionality and power without having to do everything separately; application-level environment settings are utilized quite helpfully as well. * creating custom tools: the example shows how to filter the data for North American wildfires -- it's a useful example; I think it might be even more helpful to list some of the common sources of data and practice importing them and working with them by developing additional custom tools. * working with attribute and spatial queries: I think it would have been good to go into a bit more detail about how / why syntax decisions are made, and to discuss the logic, the flow, and the structure; after all, mind and the mental processes are where clean code begins and ends. That said, the section discusses how Python interprets the queries and how / when it matters where a string is placed. The examples are clear, but I always need lots of examples, so I would have welcomed even more examples, but that would perhaps confuse some users, so I concluded that the book hit the right balance. * for the more adventurous, the book includes how to use the add-in wizard. I have always been a bit leery of add-ins, believing (perhaps superstitiously) that they will create conflicts, and unleash a small troop of gremlins. This chapter shows how / where to place an add-in in a folder that is easily discoverable by ArcGIS Desktop. This is probably the key to having the thing work, and it solves a small mystery of why add-ins sometimes do not work. In sum, I'd like to say that I find the book to be very clear, well-organized, and helpful. It's likely to have a nice, long shelf life as well.

Very helpful if you want to start developing your own ArcPy scripts. Highly recommendable.