python methods for shapefiles?

[xadder]

Hi!

I would like to learn how to read shape-files from within python scripts, so that I can grab the coordinates (e.g. of country polygons) for plotting and some manipulation (e.g. with shapely). I have read that "fiona" is a good package, and it looks neat, but doesn't exist in the Ubuntu repositories. I can install myself, but before I go too far with this I wonder if there are better alternatives for Ubuntu?

Mainly I am keen to plot spatial data above coastline maps of different pafrts of the World, and prefer not to use "mapping" packages such as basemap, GMT, cartopy, etc - but all coastline maps seem to come as shapefiles.

Thanks for any tips.

[zacktu]

Synaptic shows python-pyshp, described as read/write support for ESRI shapefile format.

[xadder]

Thanks, I'll check it out too.