web service - Web GIS Development Skill Sets

What technologies and skill sets should one who wants to do web GIS development study/acquire?

One skill/technology per answer please.

Answer

I can tell you about my experience, which started as a simple geographer, trying to use GIS products to do spatial analysis.

As I said, I'm a geographer, and from the beginning in college I started working with GIS as a user. After that, I started to research on how to automate tedious tasks I had to do often. That came as passion, and after 3 three years, I'm employed by a multinational software house, that works with many GIS systems and developing custom solutions.

My steps were:

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  Learn GIS well. Don't start out learning programming without having the fundamental right. Projections and transformations, spatial analysis, differences between the raster and vector model, etc.

  
  
  


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  Learn the database fundamentals: Introduction to Database Systems,Fundamentals of Database Systems. The two books are a bit different. The first is heavy on theory, the second one takes a more practical approach.

  
  


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  Learn SQL. This is actually a second part to the first. It will help you a great deal if you start to think in a "sqlish" manner. SQL changes from vendor to vendor. I can recommend you with PostgreSQL, which , is the vendor that follows the standard the most. If you need to learn specific dialects, do it later, when you actually need it.

  
  


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  Object Oriented Programming. It seems a challenge, but it's quite easy once you grasp the basics. Choose a easy language to do it. Python is by far the easiest one. Learning Python is an excellent starting point. There are open-source/free Python books, like Dive into Python. After Python, interesting choices are: .NET, Java, and C/C++.

  
  



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  Study programming. Read code, write code. Read geospatial code. Write geospatial code. Study the classic APIs: GEOS, JTS, GDAL, ArcObjects (if you are an ESRI fan - and it's a big plus in the market), etc.

  
  

  - Take a geospatial problem and write code to solve it. I cannot stress how useful this is. This will make you crazy, but it's a very good way to confirm that you learned the programming side and to make sure your geo-spatial skills are up to date. In my case I wrote a small PostgreSQL application to geocode traffic accidents.

  
  


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  Keep on studying. OGC standards are a nice choice here.