Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images

Ian Witten, Alistair Moffat and Timothy Bell have updated their original work with this even more impressive second edition. This version adds recent techniques such as block-sorting, new indexing techniques, new lossless compression strategies and many other elements to the mix. In short, this work is a comprehensive summary of text and image compression, indexing and querying techniques. The history of relevant algorithm development is woven well with a practical discussion of challenges, pitfalls and specific solutions.

This title is a textbook style exposition on the topic, with its information organised very clearly into topics such as compression, indexing and so forth. In addition to diagrams and example text transformations, the authors use "pseudo-code" to present algorithms in a language-independent manner wherever possible. They also supplement the reading with mg--their own implementation of the techniques. The mg C language source code is freely available on the Web.

Alone, this book is an impressive collection of information. Nevertheless, the authors list numerous titles for further reading in selected topics. Whether you're in the midst of application development and need solutions fast or are merely curious about how top-notch information management is done, this book is an excellent investment. --Stephen W. Plain