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Desktop Open Source goes mainstream, old school style
Congratulations to Gary Sherman who's recent book has successfully made it to the shelves of academia. Well that might be in part to our librarian taking advice on what open source gis books are missing that should be on the shelf.
Lucky for everyone else, since the publisher didn't classify it as a text book
it's also affordable too if you want your own copy, paper or ebook.
Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 360 pages, ISBN 1934356069, http://www.pragprog.com/titles/gsdgis/desktop-gis
Wondering what other books you've missed see the OSGeo Library
Grass Syntax Hints
Short Story
GRASS GIS command line syntax can be a little tricky and none of the graphical interfaces seem to make it easy because there's always some option you need that isn't on the GUI.
Importing a shapefile
v.in.ogr dsn=/path/to/folder/ layer=nameofshp output=giveitaname
notes: don't put .shp on the layer name, If it complains about not being the right projection but you know it is add a -o (no that's not a zero)
Long Story
I was testing out QGIS 1.0 and the grass toolbox v.in.ogr was having issues, without giving me an useful error message to work from.
So I compiled the latest grass release (6.4 RC2) and tried the new wxpython interface which also failed.
Lucky for me the good ol command line worked once I gave it all the info it wanted in the proper syntax.
