About this Book
This second edition is updated for and focused on the PostGIS 2.0 and 2.1 series and PostgreSQL 9.1–9.3 with highlights of PostgreSQL 9.4 and the upcoming PostGIS 2.2. This book isn’t a substitute for either the official PostGIS or PostgreSQL documentation. The official PostGIS documentation does a good job of introducing you to the myriad of functions available in PostGIS and provides examples on how to use each. But it won’t tell you how to combine all these functions into a recipe to solve your problems. That’s the purpose of our book. Although it doesn’t cover all the functions available in PostGIS, this book does cover the more commonly used and interesting ones and gives you the skills you need to combine them to solve classic and more esoteric but interesting problems in spatial analysis and modeling.
Although you can use this book as a reference source, we recommend that you also visit the official PostGIS site at http://postgis.net.
This book focuses on two- and three-dimensional non-curved Cartesian vector geometries, two-dimensional geodetic vector geometries, raster data, and network topologies.
Although the main purpose of this book is the use of PostGIS, we’d fall short of our mission if we neglected to provide some perspective on the landscape it lives in. PostGIS is not an island and rarely works alone. To complete the cycle, we also include the following: