Customer Reviews

Text Compression

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

 

 

1. The book is comprehensive. It describes many algorithms, and includes several studies on statistics about text compression and language modeling. It is very good in this respect.

2. Math theory is not approached systematically neither algrebaically. For instance, a proof that arithmetic compression works can take less than a page, and the details given take a lot of space and are not as clear as they could be.

3. Although the book emphasizes the idea of separating the model from the coder, the language used is the C programming language, which imposes severe restrictions to this separation. The model and the coder do not exist as entities on their own, they just have different memory space allocations. Compare this to a reasonably good implementation in a pure object environment, where you can actually model a coder object and a model object.

4. I wrote a final project based on this book consisting of several kinds of compression algorithms with implementations for the course Mathematical Objects in Smalltalk at the University of Buenos Aires.

If you're looking for a book that explains how to implement the latest and greatest variation of algorithm X, this isn't the book for you. If you want to understand at a fundamental level *why* compression works, you want to read this.

The book has just the right mix of information theory and application. Everything you need to know to understand compression is here; all the rest is in the details.

Hi y'all...

The authors have released the second edition of this book titled as "Managing Gigabytes : Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images". It is more upto date & also covers image compression rather than the first edition (this book, that is, Text Compression) covering only textual compression. It also has lots of other new info in the second edition. Btw, the second edition is cheaper than the first edition.

BTW, this is a tremendous book to have if you are brand new or a pro in compression technology. One of the authors also wrote another book called "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools & Techniques with Java Implementations", which is a really good addition to one's library!

A bit out of date .... However it is still the only book which discusses ppm modelling ..

This is a great extension of your CS classes. It has a lot of information in a format that lends itself to implementing it easily. Very good book.

Sir, I am an Undergraduate student. I like to be different from others. While all are looking in the above layers of programming i look into the core level. I am in India. If i see the cost of book as some 50 $, i comes nearly to 2000 Rs which is nearly 1/3rd of my family income. So if you make this Cost factor considering the Cost of living of other countries then it will be really a boon for the Indian People who has stuff but no proper guidence. Thank you for listening my Comments. Avail disounts for Students.