Compression

If you want to attract and retain users in the booming mobile services market, you need a quick-loading app that won’t churn through their data plans. The key is to compress multimedia and other data into smaller files, but finding the right method is tricky. This witty book helps you understand how data compression algorithms work—in theory and practice—so you can choose the best solution among all the available compression tools. With tables, diagrams, games, and as little math as possible, authors Colt McAnlis and Aleks Haecky neatly explain the fundamentals. Learn how compressed files are better, cheaper, and faster to distribute and consume, and how they’ll give you a competitive edge. Learn why compression has become crucial as data production continues to skyrocket Know your data, circumstances, and algorithm options when choosing compression tools Explore variable-length codes, statistical compression, arithmetic numerical coding, dictionary encodings, and context modeling Examine tradeoffs between file size and quality when choosing image compressors Learn ways to compress client- and server-generated data objects Meet the inventors and visionaries who created data compression algorithms

Described by Jeff Prosise of PC Magazine as one of my favorite books on applied computer technology, this updated second edition brings you fully up-to-date on the latest developments in the data compression field. It thoroughly covers the various data compression techniques including compression of binary programs, data, sound, and graphics. Each technique is illustrated with a completely functional C program that demonstrates how data compression works and how it can be readily incorporated into your own compression programs. The accompanying disk contains the code files that demonstrate the various techniques of data compression found in the book.

A comprehensive reference for the many different types and methods of compression, including a detailed and helpful taxonomy, an analysis of the most common methods, and discussions on their use and comparative benefits. The presentation is organized into the main branches of the field: run length encoding, statistical methods, dictionary-based methods, image compression, audio compression, and video compression. Detailed descriptions and explanations of the most well- known and frequently used methods are covered in a self-contained fashion, with an accessible style and technical level for specialists and nonspecialists. In short, the book provides an invaluable reference and guide for all computer scientists, computer engineers, electrical engineers, signal/image processing engineers and other scientists needing a comprehensive compilation for a broad range of compression methods.

If geography is the study of how human beings are stretched over the earth’s surface, a vital part of that process is how we know and feel about space and time. Although space and time appear as "natural" and outside of society, they are in fact social constructions; every society develops different ways of measuring, organizing, and perceiving them. Given steady increases in the volume and velocity of social transactions over space, time and space have steadily "shrunk" via the process of time-space compression. By changing the time-space prisms of daily life – how people use their times and spaces, the opportunities and constraints they face, the meanings they attach to them – time-space compression is simultaneously cultural, social, political, and psychological in nature. This book explores how various social institutions and technologies historically generated enormous improvements in transportation and communications that produced transformative reductions in the time and cost of interactions among places, creating ever-changing geographies of centrality and peripherality. Warf invokes a global perspective on early modern, late modern, and postmodern capitalism. He makes use of data concerning travel times at various historical junctures, maps of distances between places at different historical moments, anecdotal analyses based on published accounts of people’s sense of place, examinations of cultural forms that represented space (e.g., paintings), and quotes about the culture of speed. Warf shows how time-space compression varies under different historical and geographical conditions, indicating that it is not one, single, homogenous process but a complex, contingent, and contested one. This book will be useful book for those studying and researching Geography, History, Sociology, and Political Science, as well as Anthropology, and Philosophy.

"Khalid Sayood provides an extensive introduction to the theory underlying today's compression techniques with detailed instruction for their applications using several examples to explain the concepts. Encompassing the entire field of data compression Introduction to Data Compression, includes lossless and lossy compression, Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, dictionary techniques, context based compression, scalar and vector quantization. Khalid Sayood provides a working knowledge of data compression, giving the reader the tools to develop a complete and concise compression package upon completion of his book."--BOOK JACKET.