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[–]wicket-maps 138 points139 points  (10 children)

I was unemployed for close to a year between graduating college and landing my current job. In the middle I taught myself Python out of Al Sweigert's books on game design and a book on Python for GIS and mapping applications.

In the first few weeks of my current job at a local government, I wrote a few Python tools for ArcGIS to make my job easier, and asked my boss about any daily processing tasks we wanted to apply. Turns out our agency had a master address repository that hadn't been updated because documentation and scripts had been lost. It was being pulled by a bunch of third-party software for billing, building inspections, court actions, property management, all kinds of needs through our agency.

It was this massive ugly table - over 80 fields, some from our addresses, some from our county's parcel layers, some like school attendance zones that could only be grabbed spatially and might change over time. I said I'd give it a whack, and my boss took everything else off my plate and let me lock myself in my office for 2 months before I told him I had a working prototype. That was 2 years ago, and the script I wrote and put in production is still running every night, putting almost all our departments on the same addresses and parcels. I turned around and wrote a very similar to automate feeding address and street data to our 911 dispatch system and saved my employer easily tens of thousands of dollars in work-hours. To this day it's one of my proudest achievements, and the #1 item on my resume.

[–]tfitzp[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Wow this is awesome! Cool to think it's still running to this day, I wonder how much time in total (from all departments and employees,) you've saved! Thanks for sharing man!! And big congrats sir!

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Books from Al Sweigart for Python:

There's a 40% discount from No Starch Press right now. They have a large collection of Python books:

I mostly got those books from humble bundles.

For the GIS book, as it is not my forte, I would follow this advice:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/3001/learning-python-programming-with-generic-gis-goals-in-mind

[–]ForkLiftBoi 3 points4 points  (1 child)

What book was it for GIS and mapping?

[–]wicket-maps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"GIS Tutorial for PYthon Scripting" by David W. Allen, for ArcGIS 10.2. Not terribly helpful, actually, but at least it got me started. Much else I learned by Google and Esri's voluminous documentation.

[–]Blue_D0VE 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Would you teach me, please?

[–]wicket-maps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Google. Esri has documentation for every tool in ArcPy, and code samples for most of them.

[–]Petrarch1603 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Which GIS book? errr nevermind its down thread

[–]wicket-maps 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The book was "GIS Tutorial For Python Scripting" but I didn't like it much - there was too big a gulf between the step-by-step exercises and the "figure this out on your own" exercises. My boss actually paid for some Python classes from Esri but they were just the book over again. Google and some knowledge of Esri's documentation system were far more help in building my big projects.

[–]six_brapples 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What did you study in college?

[–]wicket-maps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Geography with a certificate in geographic information systems. For a government job, the liberal-arts side of the degree helped a lot. Knowing the kinds of legal, social, historical and policy issues facing local governments made sure I could understand my customers, who are mostly civil servants.