Purchase ArcView (http://www.esri.com) for corporate work. Street price is about $1100 for ArcView and (I'm guessing) $1500 for Spatial Analyst. Volume discounts are available.
Purchase a student copy of ArcView for continued study. Prices have been $150 for ArcView and Spatial Analyst (and are probably comparable for Network Analyst).
A strong competitor of ArcView is MapInfo at http://www.mapinfo.com/. Pricing is comparable to ArcView. This is an interesting product because some powerful, focused applications are being built with it. One is a product to support cellular communications tower siting--it does all the RF engineering calculations at three levels of complexity, ultimately accounting in detail for attenuation from surface clutter (buildings, trees, and so on).
Check out Manifold at http://www.manifold.net/. This is a relatively new ArcView competitor. It appears to do most of what ArcView and Spatial Analyst do, although I hear it does not have quite all the analytical capabilities. The base price is $145; add-ons cost in the $50-$150 range typically.
TNT/Mips (http://www.microimages.com/) is very powerful. It is priced based on screen resolution, with prices starting with a free working demo but getting very expensive very quickly.
GRASS (http://www.baylor.edu/~grass/) is a command-line raster-based GIS in the public domain--meaning it's free but will be more difficult to learn. (There is (was?) a commercial Windows-based version (Grasslands) but I cannot find it anywhere on the web.)
Stewart Barry of Caliper Corporation (http://www.caliper.com)
wrote to recommend two of their products. They have been around a long
time and have a good reputation, but I have not had a chance to try them, so
I will pass along his words verbatim:
"Maptitude is desktop mapping software for Windows with an extensive
set of features and data. Reasonably priced and easy to use, Maptitude
contains all of the functions found in more expensive GIS products, and
ships with alot of geographic data.
"TransCAD is a GIS software package that contains extensive
geostatistical functions including spatial correlations, model estimation,
and model evaluation. In addition, TransCAD has also functions for
estimation of statistical models used in transportation, such as estimates
of home-to-work travel demand.
"Of interest to your readers is that our company does have an academic
pricing policy for both products and that interested users can contact
us to get a demo CD for TransCAD."
