GEOG 485:
GIS Programming and Software Development

Lesson 2 Overview

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In Lesson 1, you received an introduction to Python. Lesson 2 builds on that experience, diving into Python fundamentals. Many of the things you'll learn are common to programming in other languages. If you already have coding experience, this lesson may contain some review.

This lesson has a relatively large amount of reading from the course materials, the Zandbergen text, and the ArcGIS help. I believe you will get a better understanding of the Python concepts as they are explained and demonstrated from several different perspectives. Whenever the examples use the IPython console, I strongly suggest that you type in the code yourself as you follow the examples. This can take some time, but you'll be amazed at how much more information you retain if you try the examples yourself instead of just reading them.

At the end of the lesson, you'll be required to write a Python script that puts together many of the things you've learned. This will go much faster if you've taken the time to read all the required text and work through the examples.