Preface

Although I’d taken a lot of programming classes in college, I never fully appreciated programming until I had a job that involved a lot of repetitive tasks. After amusing myself by automating much of that job, I decided to return to school and study biology, which is when I took my first GIS course. I was instantly in love, and managed to convince someone to give me a biology degree for writing an extension for ArcView GIS (a precursor to ArcGIS, for you Esri fans out there). After finishing that up, I went to work for the Remote Sensing/Geographic Information Systems Laboratory at Utah State University. One of my first projects involved some web mapping, and I soon became a big fan of the open source UMN MapServer software. That was my introduction to open source geospatial software, including GDAL.