Module 7 - Listing Tools

This week’s lesson taught us some skills that will prove to be essential to our success in the real world. We learned how to formulate our approach to creating a solution by asking some questions about the problem. 
We learned skills such as path manipulation, DESCRIBE methods, Listing tools, Usage methods, and even learned how to check and toggle license usage.
Notes to Future Self:

• When struggling with one of the tools try it in different editors to get further hints.   I had problems with the ExtractByMask function in Python Win, and couldn’t figure out why it would work in the Interactive and even in IDLE.    Turns out I needed to have my Scratch workspace defined.   Once I match my code to have the same scratch as my ArcGIS environment variable had, it was much more reliable.
• Use the Online Help.   When working on a tool it is great to use the online help to grab code from.   No need to reinvent the wheel if they already have a working version of it.
• When you get frustrated, walk away for a bit…   You’ll be surprised when the idea comes to you (hint: it usually isn’t when you are conveniently near a computer….)
• Break down tasks to their simplest elements.   When working with the ExtractByMask, I ended up having to create a separate Python script to try to use just the bare minimums to get the function to run to a hard coded file.    I took the lessons learned here back to my assignment.
• I found this assignment to be great system for using the data that we learned in the exercises.   I struggled at points, but kept at it and was able to finally make the program work.   That is tough to find assignments that are tough, but not impossible and I think this week was a good example of the challenge level that the assignments should present.
• One problem I had with the lab was on page 3 where it asked us to save a raster out to the GDB with a period in the file name.   I was unable to do this, so just left the .TIF of the file name.