The Ultimate Resource for Using and Understanding Topographic, Thematic, Planimetric, and Other Maps

Redlands, California—February 12, 2009—To unlock the wealth of information in a map, a person must know how to read one. That’s why Map Use: Reading and Analysis, Sixth Edition, will be a valuable book for people who work with, study, and appreciate maps and want to improve their map reading and analysis skills.

Replete with nearly 500 maps, photographs, tables, and charts to illustrate the text, this informative volume from ESRI Press teaches the basic concepts of geography and the skills of map reading and analysis. The book includes an overview of different types of maps, map scale and projections, grid coordinate systems, relief portrayal, qualitative and quantitative thematic maps, area and volume measures, GPS and maps, and spatial pattern analysis.

Map Use is ideal for people who need to understand the world spatially including anyone who must know how to read and analyze maps for professional, navigational, and recreational purposes such as sailing, mountaineering, and flying. Map Use also serves as a resource for introductory cartography courses and is an invaluable reference for the home, office, and library.

"Map Use was written for people who want to use maps to better understand not only the physical environment but the human, social, political, and economic environments as well," says A. Jon Kimerling, the book's co-author and interim chairman of the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "This sixth edition takes readers beyond the graphic symbols that comprise maps and into cartographers' decision-making processes to give them the insights they need to better use maps."

ESRI Press acquired the rights for this latest book from longtime Map Use publisher JP Publications, owned by Phillip C. Muehrcke, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Wisconsin, and Juliana O. Muehrcke, the founding editor of Nonprofit World. The Muehrckes wrote the first edition of Map Use, Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation in 1978, which was followed up with four subsequent editions, the last two co-authored with Kimerling. Aileen R. Buckley, a cartographic researcher at ESRI, joined the three other authors on this new project.

"The underlying theme that separates Map Use from other books on mapping is its emphasis on the fact that maps do not merely show what is in our environment but are windows into how people think, adjust to their surroundings, make decisions, and communicate geographic information with each other," says Kimerling. "In this sense, users get more out of a map than the graphic product created by the cartographer, especially when they have mastered the map reading and analysis skills so carefully presented in the book."

Map Use: Reading and Analysis, Sixth Edition (ISBN: 9781589481909, 528 pages, $99.95), is available at online retailers worldwide, at www.esri.com/esripress, or by calling 1-800-447-9778. Outside the United States, visit www.esri.com/esripressorders for complete ordering options or contact your local ESRI distributor. For a current distributor list, visit www.esri.com/distributors. Interested retailers can contact ESRI Press book distributor Ingram Publisher Services.

About ESRI Press

ESRI Press publishes books on geographic information systems (GIS), cartography, and the application of spatial analysis to many areas of public and private endeavor including land-use planning, health care, education, business, government, and science. The complete selection of GIS titles from ESRI Press can be found on the Web at www.esri.com/esripress.

About ESRI

Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.


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Carla Wheeler
ESRI
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