First piece of advice: if you’re like me, a tech-savvy civilian, but by no means a programmer, don’t assume you can buy this book and jump right into creating cool maps—especially if you don’t have a better-than-passing familiarity with DOS. The programmer-author understandably makes a few assumptions about what you’ll know about simple things like changing directories and so on within DOS.
After installing the data management tools (FWTools) and downloading the example data, it became clear to me that there was a lot about DOS I didn’t know. Luckily, in one of the chapters author Tyler Mitchell mentions a Listserv group you can join, which I did. And when I emailed the group to ask why I wasn’t able to get the same data to appear with that DOS instruction, who should reply but the author himself! How’s that for technical support?
Anyway, moving further into this early chapter, I learned that it would be nice if I knew about SQL and if I didn’t, I could look this up in another book. Well, at least he’s not writing for SQL programmers, I thought, and decided I’d skip that part. Still I began to fear that I’d gotten in hopelessly over my head.
But I plunged on to the instructions for installing the recommended mapping software OpenEV. Turns out it had already downloaded with the FWTools, and all I had to do was click the desktop icon. First a blank DOS window opened—the book instructs you immediately that you should leave this open because OpenEV needs it to run. And simultaneously several other screens pop open. And the book reassures you that yes, these windows should be open. Okay, so far, so good.
By the way, Mitchell gives alternate instructions throughout the book for both Windows users and Linux users—written simply and clearly. Lots of subheadings in each chapter help you compartmentalize the information in your head as you learn-and-do. I was regaining confidence that I could do this.
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