PostGIS in Action
This book isn't a substitute for the official PostGIS documentation. The official PostGISdocumentation does a good job of introducing you to the myriad of functions availablein PostGIS and provides examples on how to use each. It won't tell you how tocombine all these functions into a recipe to solve your problems. That is the purposeof our book. Although it doesn't cover all functions available in PostGIS, this bookdoes cover the more commonly used or interesting ones and gives you the skills youneed to combine them to solve classic and more esoteric but interesting problems inspatial analysis and modeling.While you can use this book as a source of reference, we recommend that you dovisit the official PostGIS site and download or peruse the documentation.This book focuses on two-dimensional non-curved Cartesian vector geometries.Although it is primarily about writing spatial queries against 2D vector geometries, weprovide introductions to the following ancillary topics:Creating 3D vector geometriesCreating curved geometriesCreating and querying the geodetic geography data typeWorking with raster data using the companion raster data type (integrated inPostGIS 2.0)While the main purpose of this book is the use of PostGIS, we'd fall short of our missionif we neglected to provide some perspective on the landscape it lives in. PostGIS isnot an island and rarely works alone. To complete the cycle, we also include the following:An extensive appendix that covers PostgreSQL in great detail from setup, tobackup, to security management, as well as the fundamentals of SQL and creatingfunctions and other objects in itSeveral chapters dedicated to the use of PostGIS in web mapping, viewing usingdesktop tools, PostgreSQL PL languages commonly used with PostGIS, and extraopen source add-ons such as the TIGER geocoder, pgRouting, PL/R, and PL/Python