Getting started: SOFTWARE

Looking instead for a general overview of charting, mapping, and other data viz toolkits? Check out datavisualization.ch.

##Install software

Command line tools:

If you don't have PostGIS or the rest of the open gis stack installed, check out ultimate osx geo install guide by @tokumine. For the Mac, you'll want to download most packages from KingChaos.

• Python 2.6+ (might need to upgrade the default version that ships with Mac OS X)
• PostGIS (a nasty install process, required to give TileStache a shapefile after “importing” it into PostGIS).
• TileStache (has some dependencies)

•   sudo easy_install modestmaps
  

•   sudo easy_install werkzeug
  

• Mapnik (easy Mac installer)

Easy GUI apps:

• TileMill - 2nd generation of open source cartography tools from Development Seed. Uses carto css like language to style maps, can host on MapBox.com.

• CartoDB - 2nd generation of open source cartography tools from Vizzuality. Like Google Fusion Tables.

• QGIS - 2nd generation of open source cartography tools. Like ArcMap. They win an award for worst download page ever. Sorry.

###Tutorials:

• http://www.bostongis.com/pgsql2shp_shp2pgsql_quickguide.bqg