Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Very good book for Python programmers, with a lot of "cookbook" recipes to use. This book corroborated with the ArcGIS Resource Center online helped me relearn and create a script for automating a county parcel layer. Good job, Eric!

After working through all of the chapters and examples I decided to increase my rating from four to five stars -- now after reviewing David W. Allen's "GIS Tutorial for Python Scripting" I placed it back at four stars.The book's target audience is GIS professionals who "wish to revolutionize their ArcGIS workflow with Python." To this end it provides explanations and examples of the essential building blocks to automate various tasks. For me it was good practice and I did learn some new things. I believe the author's stated purpose is accomplished with this book. Other reviewers have been unduly harsh because their expectations were too high. If you are experienced with ArcGIS but inexperienced with Python or knowledgeable about Python but relatively new to ArcGIS then I believe this book should be useful to you, but not necessarily the one you should buy -- for that check out David W. Allen's "GIS Tutorial for Python Scripting" (ESRI Press, 2014).The explanations are clear and understandable and the examples satisfactory. Chapter by chapter the author presents essential building blocks of concepts, principles and examples. In Chapter 7 and beyond the material and examples are more sophisticated so the reader progressively deepens their knowledge and toolset. Some reviewers have complained about the book's numerous errata at the publisher's website and I agree it is annoying. The mistakes and typos are mostly minor and pertain to code examples -- I don't think they were excessive and for many technical books with some publishers there are bound to be some mistakes. It was a useful challenge correcting those problems not identified by the errata at the publisher's website.Not mentioned is that some of the maps used in several chapters will open with broken data links but this is for the purpose of using arcpy.mapping capabilities to fix the broken links. Perhaps the most serious deficiency of the book is the amount of attention given to the arcpy.mapping module -- there are a more limited number of examples for the other modules available with Python (for example, the data access module is covered in Chapter 10) so keep in mind this book is a starting point and not a comprehensive introduction to Python and ArcGIS.There are many other books solely on Python -- for example, the excellent "Python Cookbook" mentioned by at least one other reviewer -- but currently there is a scarcity of books on Python and ArcGIS. One good book that is available right now is Paul A. Zandbergen's "Python Scripting for ArcGIS" (2013) from ESRI Press which I also own. Both the Zandbergen and Pimpler books are good introductions to Python scripting with ArcGIS. The Zandbergen book is excellent and the more sophisticated of the two. If you are looking to buy just one of these books then the Zandbergen book will provide a solid introduction but also enable you to get a trial version of ArcGIS software -- a great buy if you need the software. The Zandbergen book offers a more in-depth introduction to using Python with ArcGIS.Forthcoming in the summer of 2014 are more books on Python and ArcGIS from several publishers including ESRI Press. I especially recommend that you check out the book by David W. Allen from ESRI Press -- he usually writes excellent books.

This book is an extremely basic introduction to the ArcGIS 10.1 ArcPy module, with a few minor additions whose link to ArcGIS (or to GIS at all) is tenuous (sending emails? Really? And the first chapter is a generic intro to python, better covered in dozens of other dedicated resources). The "recipes" are almost all single ArcPy methods demonstrated; those seeking interesting problems and novel solutions (like the aging, but excellent "Python Cookbook") will be sorely disappointed. No real-world problems are discussed - the output from many (most?) recipes is print statements, hardly useful for much more than toy problems.On the plus side, the examples are clearer and more consistent in style than many of ESRI's own, particularly with the consistent use of the "with" statement that leads to much clearer and easier to debug code. But the chosen book structure makes several sections highly repetitive - a method is demostrated in one recipe, and then the next virtually repeats the entire thing to add an SQL query.There's also some questionable advice, like explicitly telling readers to issue "import arcpy" even in the ArcMap python console "as a good habit"; perhaps it would be good to understand the context in which you're issuing commands? The dumb insistance on this does allow the author to pad out each and every example though, because he includes it even when it's entirely un-needed. And this is not the only use of unnecessary/pointless import statements - many recipes import the "os" module and then never use it, which is hardly good style (though to be fair, ESRI documentation and training teaches similar crappy habits).If you're looking for interesting problems with practical solutions and a deep discussion of alternatives (like the "Python Cookbook") you'll be very disappointed. If this is a cookbook, it's of the "cheese on toast" variety. Only worth it for the absolute beginner - even as someone who'd never used 10.1 before, though who has a reasonable amount of experience with python and previous ArcGIS versions, I learned more from 5 minutes with the help files. Money wasted.

Very helpful if you want to start developing your own ArcPy scripts. Highly recommendable.