Data Compression: The Complete Reference

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensible but not very profound book
Review: The book is quite comprehensible also if English is not your mother tongue.

Many algorithms are touched on, but often not profound enough to allow programers to implement the methods. Also the subtitle "The Complete Reference" is questionable: I bought the book because I was looking for facts about the Elias-Willems algorithm. In vain!

Rating:
Summary: Many algorithms included, but no in-depth discussion
Review: This book explains lots of algorithms, the author tries to give you a brief overview on each of them.

However, if you're interested in the concrete ideas and proofs on how the algorithms help you to compress your data, with some mathematical works, the book isn't enough. You'll find it difficult if you want to implement the algorithms by merely reading the book.

Some idea are not clearly explained too, say, the the information on Gzip is just a summary of the GNU documentation with no in-depth discussion.

Anyway, this book is a great one judging from the (sad) fact that there are not many references on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Decent overview of many algorithms
Review: This book is more about breadth than depth. It explains the workings of pretty much every data and image compression algorithm you've ever heard of. It's not as strong on theory as Bell/Cleary/Witten's _Text Compression_, and doesn't have source code like Nelson's _The Data Compression Book_, but it does a fine job of filling in the space between.

If you're not looking for source code or lots of theory, and just want to know what all these dozens of algorithms actually *do*, this would be an appropriate book for you.