[GRASSLIST:3452] Re: Just another stupid question from a paranoid education fun!

[John Gillette]

Gordon Keith wrote [GRASSLIST:3446] 
> My take on grass is that it's fairly hard to use for lots of one off 
> jobs. There are a lot of different commands that are hard to find and 
> work out what they do. 
[snip]
> If you are planning on giving students are series of tasks to do once 
> off I'd say grass wasn't really a good idea. This is how I 
> suspect most 
> student assignments would work as you work through a 
> curriculum, touch 
> each topic and move on to the next.
[snip]
> If you are prepared to spoon feed the students with the grass 
> commands 
> they will need to get the job done it would be useable. To give the 
> students a copy of grass and a task and say go do it would be a 
> disaster.

 I appreciate the "lot of different commands" statement above having
 learned GRASS within the last year.  However, one of the things that
 makes it manageable is a good tutorial. For this I used in part
 FREC 682: Spatial Analysis http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/frec682/ 
 from the University of Delaware (USA).  In particular, under schedule 
 #8, "creating a DEM from hypsography data" helped me get started a
 lot (for the tasks I was interested in - everyone's requirements are 
 different, of course).

 I think that this curriculum is a good example of addressing the 
 issues raised above concerning how you introduce so many different
 topics required to master GRASS. For example, see how UNIX basics, 
 shell programming, and basic AWK filters are all touched on in this 
 schedule as required to give the needed background to the students.

 I ended up printing sections of this site and I use it as a text book.
 The "creating a DEM from hypsography data" section I printed in color.
 This site answered a lot of questions quickly and introduced enough 
 concepts that I could begin to understand the GRASS man pages.

John Gillette
Digital Cartography