How is this book different from other online books and resources?

We are seeing an explosion of online (and free) resources that teach how to use R for spatial data processing.⁶ Here is an incomplete list of such resources:

• Geocomputation with R
• Spatial Data Science
• Spatial Data Science with R
• Introduction to GIS using R
• Code for An Introduction to Spatial Analysis and Mapping in R
• Introduction to GIS in R
• Intro to GIS and Spatial Analysis
• Introduction to Spatial Data Programming with R
• Reproducible GIS analysis with R
• R for Earth-System Science
• Rspatial
• NEON Data Skills
• Simple Features for R
• Geospatial Health Data: Modeling and Visualization with R-INLA and Shiny

Thanks to all these resources, it has become much easier to self-teach R for GIS work than six or seven years ago when I first started using R for GIS. Even though I have not read through all these resources carefully, I am pretty sure every topic found in this book can also be found somewhere in these resources (except the demonstrations). So, you may wonder why on earth you can benefit from reading this book. It all boils down to search costs. Researchers in different disciplines require different sets of spatial data skills. The available resources are typically very general covering so many topics, some of which economists are unlikely to use. It is particularly hard for those who do not have much experience in GIS to identify whether particular skills are essential or not. So, they could spend so much time learning something that is not really useful. The value of this book lies in its deliberate incomprehensiveness. It only packages materials that satisfy the need of most economists, cutting out many topics that are likely to be of limited use for economists.

For those who are looking for more comprehensive treatments of spatial data handling and processing in one book, I personally like Geocomputation with R a lot. Increasingly, the developer of R packages created a website dedicated to their R packages, where you can often find vignettes (tutorials), like Simple Features for R.

References

Wickham, Hadley, and Jay Hesselberth. 2020. Pkgdown: Make Static HTML Documentation for a Package. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pkgdown.

Xie, Yihui. 2016. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown.

Xie, Yihui, Alison Presmanes Hill, and Amber Thomas. 2017. Blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown.

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6. This phenomenon is largely thanks to packages like bookdown (Xie 2016), blogdown (Xie, Hill, and Thomas 2017), and pkgdown (Wickham and Hesselberth 2020) that has significantly lowered the cost of professional contents creation than before. Indeed, this book was built taking advantage of the bookdown package.↩︎