GIS4Dummies

The world around geographical information systems is undoubtedly fascinating and increasingly required by the world of work.

The problem is how to become an expert in a short time!

Will it be sufficient to learn QGIS or ArcGIS Pro? Or will only Google Maps suffice?

Will you have to enroll in a university course? Take a paid online course?

None of these!

Compared to twenty years ago, when ESRI was the undisputed master in GIS and social networks had not overwhelmingly entered our daily life, it was rather complicated to find useful information to solve our problems.

Today, we face the opposite problem. We continually receive input from different sources and it is increasingly difficult to select which links to save to go deeper into the topic at a later stage.

Here my work comes into play. I have attended many courses on different online platforms such as Udacity, Udemy, Coursera and LinkedIn Learning as well as standard courses on site of universities and private companies. I also analyzed thousands of tweets on twitter and posts on Linkedin to select the best sites from which you can learn for free.

If you are interested in learning more about it because you want to become an expert or simply because you are curious to find out what you can do with a GIS, you can find my recipe here.

Git&GitHub

It will be very useful in daily activities for various reasons such as:

• To work simultaneously with other people on the same project.
• Publish your site for free.
• To store your projects.

You can find useful tutorials here.

OSGeo & ESRI

Learn GIS using the OSGeoLive (Open Source) and ESRI (commercial) platforms. I strongly advise you to follow both in order to have a broader perspective. You probably prefer to learn open source rather then ESRI. Remember a lot of job offers require skills on ESRI.

• OSGeoLive is a wonderful opportunity to learn about the Open Source world in its entirety.
• ESRI - through MOOCs you will be able to obtain licenses to use the platform and obtain a certificate at the end of the course.

The most comprehensive and free sources can be found here.

PostGIS

It’s incredibly powerful and you can solve the most complex tasks. You can find a great overview here.

GDAL

It’s a great library to convert geospatial data. You can find useful tutorials here.

WebGIS

Need a quick review on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP? You can find them here.

The ability to manage WebGIS is undoubtedly the most requested capability as it allows you to share your work with the rest of the world. You can find a great overview here.

I suggest you learn Leaflet as it is quite simple and there are a lot of documentations for different scenarios. The most comprehensive and free sources can be found here.

Python

There are excellent courses that will allow you to learn step by step. You can find a great overview here.

Open Data

More and more public bodies are sharing their data online. Often you will have to clean up the data to use them properly in a GIS. I have created a list of the main sites where you can download data for free. You can find them here.

License

Last but not least. Whenever you look for a source on the internet it will be useful to know if it is usable or not. Guides can be found here.

Final Notes

• I recommend you create a Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin account to follow the best profiles on GIS. I recommend you visit a blog list containing the most important news on GIS.
• I recommend you sign up to Medium and ScienceDirect to receive the best personalized recommendations as per your profile every day.
• I recommend you create a Stack Overflow account. Here you can ask and find a ton of useful tips.