Preface

The trend of the use of QGIS has been increasing after 2010. Why should anyone be using QGIS over some other GIS software package?

Here are only some of the reasons:

  • It’s free, as in lunch. Installing and using the QGIS program costs you a grand total of zero money. No initial fee, no recurring fee, nothing.

  • It’s free, as in liberty. If you need extra functionality in QGIS, you can do more than just hope it will be included in the next release. You can sponsor the development of a feature, or add it yourself if you are familiar with programming.

  • It’s constantly developing. Because anyone can add new features and improve on existing ones, QGIS never stagnates. The development of a new tool can happen as quickly as you need it to.

  • Extensive help and documentation is available. If you’re stuck with anything, you can turn to the extensive documentation, your fellow QGIS users, or even the developers.

  • Cross-platform. QGIS can be installed on MacOS, Windows and Linux. Now that you know why you want to use QGIS, we can show you how. The first lesson will guide you in creating your first QGIS map.

The content of this book is a compilation of materials from (Graser 2016), (Mandel 2016), (Menke 2016), (Bruy and Svidzinska 2015) and (Merns 2015)