Customer Reviews

Unicode Explained

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¶ I had another Unicode book on my desk for a long time. Hardbound, thick, impressive. Never found a way to derive useful information from it however. This book is different.

¶ I had high expectations for this book because the author, Jukka Korpela, is one of those erudite and patient people who work hard to raise the signal to noise ratio in Internet newsgroups and other forums. I certainly have quite a few posts from "Yucca" in my working archive of Web tips.

¶ Working with Web pages and applications, one can run into practical problems with text display. For Americans especially, often using default software configurations, some of the problems of displaying content in other languages can seem intractable. They are not of course -- but a bit of help from workers in the rest of the world can be a real lift. After all, they deal with these issues in a practical way more often.

¶ I had a nasty run-in (also known as "learning experience") with browser display issues when my "CSS Cheatsheet" rose in popularity in Google and other search engines. I decided to create a page quoting comments from linking sites in their native languages. Everything was fine until I got to Russian. I felt as if I were up against a conspiracy of browsers, tools, operating systems and even particular custom configurations!

¶ If you are like me and your focus is practical, I recommend:
The first two chapters in Part 1: Characters as Data; Writing Characters
All the advanced topics in Part 3: these 5 chapters covered character issues involved with programming and developing in the Internet environment.

¶ Overall, this book is well-organized and quite readable, with lots of relevant illustrations. Important material is repeated and summarized for greater clarity. The author also used lots of examples from Windows programs that are familiar to many of us. This is a real plus.

This book is excellent. The author's writing style is easy to read and he pretty much explains everything about Unicode. It's perfect if you're working with multi-lingual Web sites or email, or just if you want to start using Unicode for all of your Web site development (something everyone should do).

The only thing disappointing about this book is that all of his examples and screen shots are for and from Windows. A reader could come away with the feeling that Mac OS X and Linux don't have as much support for Unicode as Windows which, of course, is not the case at all. The least he could have done is to mention and give screenshots of Linux's "Character Map" app and Mac OS X's built-in "Character Palette", both of which are pretty much just like the Windows "Character Map" app.

I'm surprised O'Reilly allowed a book about such a platform-neutral subject to be so Windows-centric. Hopefully they can hire someone to add Linux and Mac OS X examples into the second edition.

If you're like me, you probably think of Unicode as "expanded ASCII" and that's about it. But there is infinitely more to the subject than I thought, and Unicode Explained by Jukka K. Korpela is an exhaustive reference to all that is Unicode. And in this increasingly global computing environment, you will need to know this information...

Contents:
Part 1 - Working with Characters: Characters as Data; Writing Characters; Character Sets and Encoding
Part 2 - A Systematic Look at Unicode: The Structure of Unicode; Properties of Characters; Unicode Encodings
Part 3 - Advanced Unicode Topics: Characters and Languages; Character Usage; The Character Level and Above; Characters in Internet Protocols; Characters in Programming
Appendix - Tables for Writing Characters; Index

In concept, Unicode is real simple. An expanded character set using 16 bit encoding, and you can accommodate far more languages and symbols than straight ASCII. But the implementation is far more complex than that. Korpela starts with the basics of characters... what they are, what they mean, and the nuances involved. From there, you learn about how applications have to interpret the different encoding standards and handle things like case, sort orders, line breaks, etc. When I saw the size of the book (600+ pages), I wondered if the material was just a lot of reference tables that could be found online. Gladly, it's not... This is an exploration of everything that is Unicode, and you'd have to wade through a lot of web pages to even begin to glean the level and value of information that you'll find here.

If you have anything to do with programming or designing global software, this book purchase is a no-brainer. And even if you're not doing anything in that area right now, this is one of those reference titles that is worth having on your bookshelf and available for the first time you *do* need it. It won't take long to pay for itself...

I had to deal with Unicode in greater detail for two reasons. I am working on some old ASCII and ANSI text converter for the web to be able to show them in text format in a browser, rather than converting them to an image as existing tools do. The second reason is XML and the normalization of the content distributed via XML and processed or used by XSLT or DHTML apps.

I realized that the whole subject is a lot more complicated than I initially thought and the number of questions that needed an answer to move forward with what I was doing increased significantly. I was finding stuff on the web, a little bit here and a little bit there and had it one day, because progress was slow.

I stumbled one day across this book via a Google search, which returned passages from it from its Google Book search results. I found a very good answer to one of my questions and answers to some other questions that were lying around unanswered from before. I checked the index of the book to see what subjects it covers and realized that it pretty much covers all of them. So I went ahead to Amazon and bought it right there and then.

I am glad to this day that I found it and can recommend it to anybody who has only little or no knowledge of Unicode and struggles with getting a grip on all those standards for data encoding, which make it hard to keep the data within XML and text files intact across platforms and prevent your XML based application or tool from breaking because of illegal data in your content.

Are you an IT professional who needs to understand Unicode and work with it? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Jukka Korpela, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that explores Unicode processing generally, but does not go into great detail on all parts of the Unicode character space.

Korpela, begins by providing a self-contained tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. Then, the author gives detailed information about using Unicode and other character codes. Finally, he discusses relatively independent topics to be read according to each reader's specific needs.

This most excellent book guides you through the Unicode and character world. More importantly, it explains how to identify and classify characters.

This book is easy to read and contains a mix of technical and non technical information. This is just what I needed it has practical internet links to useful utilities, references and such resources to enable many tasks related to Unicode. Also there are clear explanations in many areas of Unicode topics and sub topics including what people that speak various languages would expect.

A focus of the book is on the problems that Unicode helps to address and this is important because Unicode is a tool rather than a full solution.

Being a software developer, in experienced with multiple human language support I appreciate this insight to help me to avoid the known problems.

Although the "Unicode Standard" is the authoritative Unicode reference book, it's not exactly what I'd call a "good read." This is the first book that I'd happily recommend to anyone wanting an easy-to-understand Unicode book. But make no mistake -- this is a thorough book. Jukka did a great job of making a difficult subject a lot less difficult.

The author presents Unicode well from all possible angles. He also explains related topics like character encodings, transfer encodings, ways to input the characters in popular software programs, font issues, portability. It is well written.

Its side notes are also interesting - explaining things like Arabic right-to-left with its contextual characters with 4 different forms; or how they mused over using one common Chinese Han character to be shared by Japanese , Koreans and Vietnamese versus including a version of each in their languages' ranges of individually separate characters.