Text Compression (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

M->CREATED

Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1st edition (January 26, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0139119914
• ISBN-13: 978-0139119910
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,535,009 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for compression-heads, June 28, 1998

By A Customer

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, lacking some finish details, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

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.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get the 2nd Edition of the this book!, August 1, 2001

By	"chrisfernando" (Dubai, United Arab Emirates) - See all my reviews

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!