Open-source GIS tools are maturing rapidly, and Gábor Farkas' new book Practical GIS is a guide to applying these tools to managing geographic information like a pro at minimal cost. Farkas deploys the popular QGIS application and explains how to use it to generate useful spatial data. From there, readers are guided through the basics of queries, data management and geoprocessing.

After mastering the essentials, readers practice their knowledge on real-world examples, solving various types of geospatial analyses with appropriate methods.

Finally, readers learn how to publish data (and results) on the web with QGIS Server and GeoServer and create a basic web map with the API of the lightweight Leaflet web-mapping library. Storing data in a PostGIS database also is treated in the book.