Customer Reviews

Managing Gigabytes : Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images (Digital Multimedia Standards)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the only book there is that will actually teach you how to build an information retrieval system (aka search engine). It discusses all the algorithms and tradeoffs, and comes with free downloadable source code to experiment with. Some of the material is standard, but covered in more implementation detail here than anywhere else. Some of the material is novel: you won't find better coverage of compression unless you hand-assemble twenty research papers, and reverse-engineer them to figure out how they're implemented. But with "Managing Gigabytes", it's all here. (Although, after a particularly envigorating discussion of how to string together a bunch of techniques to compress their corpus and save a couple 100MB, I did a check and found you could buy 512MB of RAM for less than the cost of the book. Knowledge is Power, but sometimes a little cash is more powerful.) The only negative is that this book is not called "Managing Terabytes", as the first edition promised/threatened it might be. RAM and disk are cheap, but not that cheap, and for now terabytes (and sometimes petabytes) are managed only by NASA, Google, and a few others. I can't wait to see the third edition!

MG gave a good introduction to the components of practical Information Retrieval (IR). You can clearly see that the authors have a genuine interest in the field! But, I would like some more theoretical analysis of the algorithms used(i.e. O-notation), and more focus on parallell implementations of IR systems. Another book related to the same area worth mentioning is "Modern Information Retrieval".

As others have said, MG is a good introductory text for Information Retrieval. However I think it spends a little too much time on compression techniques and lacks a good discussion of incremental or on-line indexing. The book tends to assume that the set of texts to be searched is static - if new documents can be added or old ones deleted it makes the whole problem much harder and many of MG's techniques are no longer relevant. That said, I strongly look forward to Managing Terabytes (if it ever appears).

Managing Gigabytes is a must read for anyone iterested in how to transmit, access, store, and search large amounts of data. I'm the President and CTO of Aladdin Systems, Inc, the creators of the StuffIt compression product line for Mac and Windows, and I find it an invaluable addition to my reference library. The authors take complex information and present it in an organized, easy to read format, suitable for novices to experts. I highly recommend this book.

This text sets the standard for future information retrieval texts and has replaced the Salton books as the canonical academic text.

The second edition is highly readable and contains a thorough updating of the algorithms and data structures in the field.

I like the text because of its readability, conciseness, thoroughness, and attention to detail. The comparisons of algorithms on realistic sized collections is unparalleled in other texts.

I have used this text for the past 5 years in a graduate level information storage and retrieval class but I believe it has a much wider audience due to the quality of writing.

Additionally, the free availability of the mg system which implements many of the best algorithms of the text allows the reader/student to take advantage of the technology without having to start from scratch.

Highly recommended.

Managing Gigabytes is the best book out there on information retrieval. If you're interested in implementing your own IR system, there's nothing available that comes close to this book. But the book is good not just because it's the only one out there: the writing is excellent, the algorithms are presented clearly and explained well, and the coverage is thorough. Additionally, the coverage of compression algorithms is the best I've found in any book. All algorithms and pseudo-code in the book are presented clearly enough such that any competent programmer should be able to implement them. If all else fails, however, the free downloadable source code for the mg system can fill in any gaps.

All in all, this is the best computer science book I've purchased in years. I wish all CS books were written like this one: it doesn't skimp on the theory or on the implementation details.

This is one of those rare books that succeeds both on a theoretical and practical level. The theory underlying management and retrieval of large collections of mixed text and image data is thoroughly covered. The authors' experience in developing the accompanying software shines through in the clarity of their explanations and enables them to give practical information regarding the techniques discussed. The software is not just of academic interest, either - an appendix describes a digital library, accessible over the web, that is supported by the mg software. In summary, this is a great book - readable, thorough and practical.

A wonderful feature of this book spans out practicality for various topics including compresion algorithms and theory, document and imaging system and information retrieval. On my personal interest, the authors highlight a vast list of not only the theory but present it in a simple common sense logic.

There are several examples that break down complex processes into simple and easy to understand logic and the pages provides a smooth flow of the structured topics. Well organised, presented and fully informative.

Truly an ideal book. This serves as a superior text for students studying document and imaging systems, processing and information and multimedia retrieval subjects. Beautiful!!!

Just on a personal note, it would be great to see some emphasis in the future editions in regards to web mining applications.

I found MG exceedingly readable, and particularly useful. The ideas are very well explained, and the problems are solved in a stepwise fashion, leading from a simple, inefficient solution to a problem to a more complex, efficient one. Where appropriate, pseudocode is included to communicate the algorithms unambiguously. I use the free MG software in my research on information retrieval, and this book is an indispensible supplement to the software. The ideas on compression and efficiency described in the book and implemented in the software are the best that I know of in the public domain, and I've looked!

It has been 8 years since it was published and I could see it is still one of the best in IR field. Without much long magic equations, it is not hard for common user to pick it up. There are mainly 2 parts in the book, the first book is compression, most of them are just principle introduction since it does not make sense for the read to invent or implement an algorithm. The second part is indexing (plus some query) which I highly recommended because it is "practical".
The authors are smart guys who could do sth, google mg for their website and mg4j for the ported java implementation.