Installing shapely, matplotlib, and descartes
A large part of geospatial analysis and visualization is made possible using Shapely, matplotlib, GDAL, OGR, and descartes, which are installed later. Most of the recipes here will use these libraries extensively so setting them up is necessary to complete our exercises.
Shapely (http://toblerity.org/shapely) provides pure spatial analysis of geometries using the Cartesian coordinate system as is used by AutoCAD, for those of you familiar with CAD-like programs. The benefit of using a flat coordinate system is that all the rules of Euclidean geometry and analytic geometry are applied. For a quick refresher in the coordinate systems that we all learned in school, here is a little image to quickly jolt ...
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