🙂 The book is slow and recursive, but a 180 days to play with all the plugins and whistles allows for way deeper learning via the internet. A 180 day trial for $50- when taken as a college course, this isn't to bad.
My first solution was to buy an ESRI Press textbook on amazon. Despite the annoying bureaucracy and expense of the software, some things are faster (but not better!) in ESRI, like dealing with raster / multiband data. QGIS is always the prefered solution- open source, excellent free plugins, works on mac natively- but in a college / research environment, the only option that supports other people and school machines is ESRI. I need to run ESRI products on my MacBook Pro.
Using ESRI ArcGIS / ArcMap on Macs: 2 methods Check out the expanded GIS notes page here!