Make Smarter - OpenGeo Workshops, John Resig, and the Geospatial Revolution

There was a lot of stuff in the make smarter category this past month. If you’re not smarter after going through some of these, it is not my fault.

First up, OpenGeo has been kind enough to release their workshop materials under a Creative Commons Share-Alike With Attribution license, and they’ve added a number of workshops given at this year’s FOSS4G conference to their course materials. Added to their already great resources is Introduction to GeoServer, Introduction to OpenLayers, and Introduction to PostGIS. You can also view a great presentation PDF on PostGIS for Power Users by Paul Ramsey.

Speaking of PostGIS, Nicklas Avén created PostGISonline, a great tutorial/testbed that lets you send queries and draw maps directly to PostGIS from within a browser. Very cool stuff.

To say John Resig is a JavaScript Ninja is understating the case. Think Vitamin links to (and has a transcript of) his talk at Advanced Javascript to Improve your Web App from the Future of Web Apps conference.

Advanced Javascript to Improve your Web App from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Penn State Public Broadcasting has a series of coming out called Geospatial Revolution. It describes the project as:

The Geospatial Revolution Project is an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

Opensource.com has a good post called Teaching Open Source Practices, Version 4.0. Sean O’Sullivan (one of MapInfo’s founders) helped create the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and one of their products is the creation of a ton of education material, all of which is under a creative commons license. You can find the materials here.

Here are a few parting shots:

• On the web development front, check out Nettut+'s Getting to Work with CSS3 Power Tools, their Quick and Easy JavaScript Testing with Assert, and the HTML5 templates listed by CSS-Tricks. If you're new to the web development scene, check out Google's HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up.
• If you're interested in getting started with Drupal, check out Six Revision's Getting Started with Drupal: A Comprehensive Hands-On Guide. Emphasis on comprehensive - it's a very, very long post. Kudos for putting it all on one page.
• Craig Knoblock from USC has a good Google Tech Talk on A General Approach to Discovering, Registering, and Extracting Features from Raster Maps.
• Via Lifehacker, Microsoft has released a free ebook for teens called Own Your Space--Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online. It's creative commons licensed and it weighs in at 250 pages. It's a nice a gesture, and if anybody knows about security problems, it's Microsoft.