The File Formats Handbook [Hardcover]

Gunter Born (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

A resource for programmers, consultants, researchers and students in the field of graphics and file formats. Each applications program uses its own vendor-specific format to store data. End-users demand that programs accept data files that may have been created by totally different and sometimes competing programs. Software developers in particular depend on the file format information of different applications programs to implement advanced import and export functions. Unfortunately, most of the information is confidential, not well documented, or not available for public use. This handbook uncovers the file formats used by popular software products in the areas of databases, spreadsheets, word processing, graphics, sound and multimedia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1274 pages
• Publisher: Int Thompson Computing Press (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1850321175
• ISBN-13: 978-1850321170
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.8 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,974,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Handy reference for parsing many popular file formats!, August 1, 2000

By 

Kent M. Pitman - See all my reviews

This review is from: The File Formats Handbook (Hardcover)

Many of the files I've wanted to parse were graphics files and were covered by the probably-better-known Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (from O'Reilly), but this book goes beyond the file formats listed in that book to cover other useful formats like various database (dBase and FoxPro and SDF) and Spreadsheets and word processing (Word 3-5, WordStar, WordPerfect 5/5.1, RTF, AMI Pro 3-4). It's remarkably hard to find references to these various formats, especially all in one place like this. This book does cover graphics files, too, but that's not its principal focus.

There's a brief but useless section on SGML, but it doesn't do SGML justice; get Goldfarb's SGML Handbook if you want to know about SGML.

On the other hand, I found the description of GIF file parsing in this book to be technically superior to the description in the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats.

Overall, I like the style in which file formats are presented.

My copy of the book is dated 1995, and probably its main weakness is that is 5 years out of date. But I still regard it as quite a valuable reference for file formats that were already in existence at its time of publication.