The fifth edition of Professor Keith Clarke’s popular text, Getting Stated with Geographic Information Systems, became available in a Korean language edition published by Sigma Press, Inc. in April of 2011, and now it’s available in a Chinese edition, published by Pearson. The English version, published by Pearson Education, Inc., is described as follows: “Designed to make the complexity of this essential high-tech field accessible to beginning students, this text provides a basic, non-technical, and student-friendly introduction to geographic information systems. In one convenient source, its comprehensive, integrated coverage examines the basic GIS material that is traditionally scattered throughout the Geography curriculum—e.g., in Cartography, GIS spatial analysis, and quantitative methods. Clarke’s ‘learn-by-seeing’ approach features clear, simple explanations and an abundance of illustrations and photos.”
Alumnus Jeff Onsted (PhD 2007), now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies a Florida International University, submitted the following product review of Clarke’s English edition to Amazon: “Clarke’s Getting Started with GIS has been a staple of the Introductory GIS student’s diet for well over a decade. One of the grand masters of Geographic Information Science, Clarke is an authoritative and experienced voice. Unlike other texts that are too parochially associated with one software package, this text is broad enough to be applicable to any GIS class, regardless of software. As in previous editions, Clarke insists on one lengthy chapter that introduces students to cartography, coordinate systems, projections, and geodesy before delving into the nuts and bolts of GIS itself. This text is also replete with numerous, and very up-to-date, websites that offer free data, free software, or GIS community opportunities. Clarke is very current not only with the latest trends of GIS, both with stand-alone software as well as online sources and community, but also devotes an entire chapter to explore the future of GIS.”
By the way, Keith created the clever cover image, and he didn’t use Photoshop. It was a literal cut and paste job; ask him about it!
