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The Data Compression Book Paperback – December 14, 1995

by Mark Nelson (Author),‎ Jean-Loup Gailly (Author)

12 customer reviews

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The Data Compression Book Second Edition The Data Compression Book is the most authoritative guide to data compression techniques available. This second edition has been updated to include fractal compression techniques and all the latest developments in the compression field. All the code in the previous edition has been updated to run with today's compilers and has been tested on multiple platforms to ensure flawless performance. You'll learn to write C programs for nearly any environment as you explore different compression methods. Nelson and Gailly discuss the theory behind each method and apply the techniques involved to shrink data down to a minimum. Each technique is illustrated with a complete, functional C program that not only demonstrates how data compression works, but it also can be incorporated into your own data compression programs. You'll also get detailed benchmarks demonstrating the speed and compression ability of each technique. The code in this book has been tested on a variety of platforms and compilers including Microsoft Visual C++ 1.5 with MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.22; Borland C++ 4.0 and 4.5 with MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.22; Symantec C++ 6.0 and 7.0 with MS-DOS 5.0 & 6.22; Interactive Unix System 3.2 with the portable C compiler; Solaris 2.4 with the SunSoft compiler; and Linux 1.1 with the Gnu C Compiler. Topics Include:

The Shannon-Fano and Huffman coding techniques
Adaptive Huffman coding techniques
Lossy compression
The JPEG compression algorithm
Fractal compression techniques
Arithmetic coding
Dictionary compression methods

The Data Compression Book

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

MARK NELSON is a regular contributor to various technical publications including Dr. Dobbs Journal, Computer Language, and the C User's Journal. JEAN-LOUP GAILLY, a software consultant with more than 15 years of programming experience, wrote the compression code of the freeware zip archiver and is the author of the gzip data-compression program.

Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 2 edition (December 14, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1558514341
ISBN-13: 978-1558514348
Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 12 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,193,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #463 in Books > Computers & Technology > Networking & Cloud Computing > Network Administration > Storage & Retrieval
- #2518 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems
- #2789 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development

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a book which has its positive and negative sides...

June 19, 2000

Format: Paperback

PROs: 1. It is one of very few books on data compression available on the market. 2. Description of the IDEAS of compression techniques is very well written. 3. The books comes with the C code for most algorithms. 4. Fairly wide scope of data compression techniques is presented.
CONs: 1. Possibly for copyright reasons, the formats of commonly used file formats are not disclosed; the enclosed propgrams are generic compression algorithms, which do not create (or open) actual .ZIP, .ARC, or .JPG files, which can be opened by commercial programs. Therefore, this book will not help you to open standard compressed files from your home-made programs. 2. There is a missing link between the well described ideas (general principles) of the compression techniques, and their actual algorithms presented as C programs - namely, the algorithms are not described verbally. You have to analyze typically 6-page-long programs to understand how the actual encoding is done. 3. Although there is a section on sound compression, the MP3 standard is not explained. The same applies to MPEG.
SUMMARY: Good to get a general idea how the data compression is performed. Helpful if you want to develop your own compressed data format. Of very limited help if you want to work with standard compressed files in your own program. Requires knowledge of C and some time to study the enclosed code.

0Comment 43 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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Paul Laub

Still use, still relevant

March 23, 2011

Format: Paperback

From zip archives to jpg images, compressed data are ubiquitous on
hard drives and on the internet. Consequently, a book offering
the intermediate-level programmer a hands-on introduction to data
compression is valuable. Even better is a book that does so using
C language source code compiling to ready-to-use executables.

That better book is The Data Compression Book (2nd edition).
Published in 1996 and now out of print (but available through
used book vendors), this book takes the reader from Huffman
coding to the Ziv - Lempel LZ77 and LZ78 dictionary compression
algorithms that are the heart of much lossless data compression.
Lossy compression of audio and image data are also addressed.
Most valuable to me is the patient yet thorough coverage of the
discrete cosine transform and the entropy (i.e., "zigzag")
encoding central to jpg images. The second edition ends with a
new chapter on fractal image compression, a fascinating topic
sadly encumbered within a minefield of patents. Yet, as those
patents expire, fractal methods introduced here may see a
renaissance.

Anyone integrating the standard compression libraries (e.g.,
zlib, libjpeg, and libpng) into their software will find this
book useful. And if you anticipate modifying those libraries
(perhaps to introduce data hiding (steganography)), this book
will be even more useful through the technical background it
provides.

The book does show its age in places. (1) Source code originally
came on a floppy disk. The used copy I bought lacked it. Emailing
the first author (markn at ieee dot org) brought a prompt reply
with an attached zip file of all source files. (2) Not covered,
of course, are compression methods developed since 1996. These
include the LZMA methods used by 7-zip and Rar, mp3 audio
compression, and the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm used by bzip2. (3)
A graphics display utility program that is part of the source
writes directly to video memory, a classic DOS-era hack. That's
not apt to work anymore! A simple workaround is to convert the
graphics test files supplied with the source to portable graymap
files. Do that by prepending the following three lines of text

P5
320 200
255

to the test image file and by changing the extension of the
resulting file to .pgm. Now most image display programs (e.g.,
Gimp, Irfanview, Xnview) will display the image. (For how this
works, read the Wikipedia article on the Netpbm graphics format.)
Using mingw gcc 3.4.5 on Windows XP, I found compiling and
linking the source code to be problem-free. The authors tried
hard to keep their C code as portable as possible.

Finally, to those who might snub this book for the attention it
gives to first-generation compression methods such as Huffman
coding, I offer this anecdote. Adaptive Huffman, I found, often
beats other more powerful methods, including 7-zip and rar, when
the data set to compress is tiny (i.e., about the size of a
"tweet", 140 bytes or less). Adaptive Huffman wins because,
unlike the more powerful methods, it includes no header or other
overhead in the compressed file. Older can sometimes be better.

0Comment 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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Xiyu Xie

I am not an EE major. Actually, I ...

April 15, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I am not an EE major. Actually, I never found any EE oriented book or class very clear to me.
I have been looking into the compress algorithms recently, this is really a life saver. It make things really simple and clear.
I guess it is not a book for people looking for theoretical proof.
For people who are really bothered by the confusing descriptions of compression algorithms in other sources, and feels they have to look into the source code to make thinks straight, this book is a book place to start.

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A customer

Very useful for the application-oriented

October 23, 1998

Format: Paperback

If your primary interest is in writing compression algorithms, this is the book you want. It does a fine job of explaining several different techniques, and shows you how to implement them.
It's light on the theory side, so if you're more interesting in the "why" than the "what", you may want to choose a different book. One exception to this is the explanation of arithmetic coding and statistical methods, which can actually be read and understood in one pass.

0Comment 11 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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Gretta Bartels

Too much about C programming, not enough about compression

June 15, 2000

Format: Paperback

This book's target audience is the novice C programmer who needs to implement data compression of some kind. The authors go to great pains to explain exactly how the code works, but they don't do as good a job on the algorithms themselves. If you are a competent C programmer and/or have any formal training in algorithms, this is probably not the book for you, though it may be a good jumping-off point if it's the only book you can get your hands on.

0Comment 16 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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Matthew C. Hersant

Five Stars

February 20, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very satisfied!

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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A customer

The best book for programmers needing algorithms not theory.

September 1, 1999

Format: Paperback

This book did a better job than any other of teaching me sliding window dictionary encoding and adaptive huffman encoding. It got right to the point in an easy to understand fashon. There was no thick cloud of theory masking the information I needed. Read this book before you read others on the subject of data compression.

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danny

OK for implementors

August 25, 2000

Format: Paperback

If you want to implement a compression scheme fast easily, or to have general knowledge about compression algorithms this is a very good book. If you really want to deeply understand compression algorithms, to have some kind of insight about them, and to know about the best algorithms available today - this book is has less benefit (understatement).

0Comment 21 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes