Shawn Wallbridge fanned the flames of a fire I've had burning for GIS since working with ArcInfo at the UofM. I've built some of the tools he mentioned in his presentation at the MUUG (thanks again Shawn!) and thought I'd share some of the resources I've found.
Having no formal education in geography I've had to bootstrap myself so these links range from the tutorial to the advanced.
I built qgis and grass 6 and then got my feet wet with the workshop from the Open Source Geospatial '05 Conference: http://mpa.itc.it/markus/mum3
For an excellent introduction and study of map projections (ie. Mercator, azimuthal orthographic, etc) see http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/CartIndex/cartIndex.html
For training on the geospatial infrastructure available from the government of Canada see http://www.geoconnections.org/publications/training_manual/e/
These are links I've been using since I've learned more about what I'm doing: Standards bodies: Open Geospatial Consortium http://www.opengeospatial.org/ Free data sources: http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/dataservices/free_data.html http://geography.usgs.gov/products.html#digital_data http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/ http://nationalatlas.gov/pros.html http://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/mli_data/index.html (must register) http://www.esri.com/data/download/basemap/index.html http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/nationalatlas/ http://www.geographynetwork.ca/data/freedata.html#
How did I find all this stuff? It was a twisty path, but it began with http://www.freegis.org. There I found links to all the software Shawn mentioned, links to data sources, and then it all cascaded from there. Just choose English, Deutsch, or French in the upper-right corner. Notable for some, but I haven't investigated it yet because Shawn's Part II will be discussing it, is the mapping servers available. For now, a teaser is this link that checks the status of all the mapping servers known to part of the US government: http://registry.fgdc.gov/serverstatus/ The link can be useful in locating data sources for download, not just mapping servers, as they include the home page link for each server. So even if it is down, you may be able to find free data there.
Regards, Daryl