Note: these pages are no longer maintained

Never the less, much of the information is still relevant.
Beware, however, that some of the command syntax is from older versions, and thus may no longer work as expected.
Also: external links, from external sources, inside these pages may no longer function.

	Getting started [installing the software]
2011 January 28

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This one isn't a theory handbook: this one is a practical how-to tutorial for absolute beginners.
The underlying assumption is that you ignore everything about DBMS, SQL and even GIS.
So we'll begin downloading few resources from the WEB, and we'll then immediately start our operative session:

first we'll download the spatialite_gui software: this one is a simple but powerful tool (supporting graphics, mouse and so on ..) allowing you to interact with a SpatiaLite database.
then we'll download some publicly available dataset required to build the sample DB we'll use during our exercises.

Download the app

Start your web browser and go to SpatiaLite's home: http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite
The current version (January 2011) is v.2.4.0-RC4, and you can get executable binaries from: http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite-2.4.0-4/binaries.html

Quite obviously the download site layout changes from time to time, so the above URLs may become quickly outdated.
May be Linux users have to build binaries from themselves starting from sources: in such case read carefully the appropriate release notes before starting.

Download the sample dataset #1

The first dataset we'll use is the Italian National Census 2001, kindly released by ISTAT (the Italian Census Bureau).
Point your web browser at http://www3.istat.it/ambiente/cartografia/ and then download the following files:

Censimento 2001 - Regioni (Regions):
http://www3.istat.it/ambiente/cartografia/regioni2001.zip
Censimento 2001 - Province (Counties):
http://www3.istat.it/ambiente/cartografia/province2001.zip
Censimento 2001 - Comuni (Local Councils):
http://www3.istat.it/ambiente/cartografia/comuni2001.zip

Download the sample dataset #2

The second required dataset is GeoNames, a worldwide collection of Populated Places.
There are several flavors of this dataset: we'll use cities-1000 (any populated place into the word counting more than 1,000 peoples).
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities1000.zip

Launching the app

The spatialite_gui tool doesn't require any installation: simply unzip the compressed image you've just now downloaded, and click the launch icon. That's all.

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	Author: Alessandro Furieri a.furieri@lqt.it
	This work is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license.

	Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.