About the Author

Joel Lawhead is a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a certified Geographic Information Systems Professional, and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for http://www.nvisionsolutions.com/, an award-winning firm specializing in geospatial technology integration and harsh-environment engineering. Joel builds geospatial systems for US government agencies, including NASA, NOAA, the US Department of Homeland Security, and the military. He also works with private organizations, including the National Oceans and Applications Research Center (NOARC) and The Ocean Cleanup. He has authored other books with Packt Publishing, including Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, and Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, Second Edition. His cookbook recipes have been featured in two editions of the O’Reilly Python Cookbook. Joel began using Python in 1997 and combined it with geospatial software development in 2000. He is also the developer of the widely used open source Python Shapefile Library (PyShp) and maintains the geospatial technical blog, http://geospatialpython.com/, and Twitter feed, @SpatialPython, discussing the use of Python within the geospatial industry. In 2011, Joel reverse-engineered and published the undocumented shapefile spatial indexing format and assisted fellow geospatial Python developer, Marc Pfister, in reversing the compression algorithm, allowing developers around the world to create better integrated and more robust geospatial applications involving shapefiles. In 2002, Joel received the international Esri Special Achievement in GIS award for his work on the Real-Time Emergency Action Coordination Tool (REACT) for emergency management using geospatial analysis.

This book would not be possible without the support of my beautiful family, including my wife, Julie, and four children, Lauren, Will, Lillie, and Lainie, who inspire everything I do. I would also like to acknowledge my employers and coworkers at http://www.nvisionsolutions.com/, a bright, dynamic team of people dedicated to working together at the exciting bleeding-edge of geospatial technology. And finally, thank you to the excellent reviewers for this and my other books, especially Joshua Arnott, who patiently and faithfully burned clumsy sentences to the ground so that a more technically-correct phoenix could rise up the ranks of the Amazon category Top 100 list.