Customer Reviews

Programming for the World: A Guide to Internationalization

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This book is well written but quite dated. There is no mention of "Windows" and "Unicode" was only theoretical at the time. It has good background on the central issues of software internationalization but is sadly out-of-date for current software developers (especially if using Windows).

This is a decent overview to some general aspects of internationalization and localization. However, there isn't a whole lot in the book that's not available from various places on the web. Furthermore, there's no discussion of Unicode, no application of Windows, and no mention of what's the right way to do things in HTML and XML. It's very, very 1994. I can't stress enough how much is missing from this book without a mention of Unicode. All examples given are in Unix, which may or may not be a negative, depending on your needs. A lot of pages are spent on various character encoding schemes, which are now almost completely irrelevant. Since there aren't that many good internationalization books, you might be better off finding information on the web.

Good introduction to i18n issues. I also feel that it give a pretty complete handling of the basic issues. Great companion for the O'Reilly CJKV book. O'Donnell's book concisely and clearly explains general issues. Specifically: I use it often for the explanation of the various encoding methods and how they are implemented.