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Title: Unicode: A Primer by Tony Graham ISBN: 0-7645-4625-2 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 22 March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Non-Intimidating Introduction to Unicode
Comment: If you are a computer professional and have to deal with web pages in various languages, you will need to know what Unicode is about.
This book is a good first look at Unicode. While it does not go into nitty-gritty details, it gives a good overview of what it is about. Now I am no longer in complete darkness, thanks to this book.
After this book, I will proceed to the official Unicode 3.0 hardcover reference.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not a good source for fundamentals...
Comment: Character encoding is not for the faint hearted. Unicode promises to end all that.
If you are interested in fundamentals of Unicode, you'll be dissapointed with "Unicode:A Primer" . For instance, do you know how exactly your vi editor is able to display that russian character by talking to the xterm ? My expectation in reading this book was to get an idea of what in the world are UCS-2, ISO-8859, ISO-10646, Unicode, UTF-8, etc...and what is the basic difference between them . So, I was actually interested in the author talking about these encoding standards in a low-level detailed manner.
The material in the first five chapters , which form the introduction to Unicode, appears jumbled and quiet hopelessly out of sequence. If one is used to reading in a widely accepted manner of first defining things and then discussing them, one would be dissapointed. It is only in Chapter 4, for instance, that the author defines UTF-7, UTF-16 etc - whereas these "terms" are frequently used in the preceding sections.
But, if you don't care about the basics and would like to get into the details right away - there are parts of this book you'll find useful. Not completely satisfactory maybe, but at least useful. For instance, you get to explore the difference between the various standards - all in one book. And that's good. There are chapters on programming language, OS and XML/HTML which would be useful for programmers. For example, the book talks about how Perl, Java, C++, etc. (with some code too!) and databases support Unicode - how Windows 98 does not. So, if you are working on encoding and know what you want, you may actually find it here.
But, contrary to what the title claims, this book doesn't do a great job being a primer. The back of the book states the Reader Level to be : Intermediate to Advanced. And that's fair.
Rating: 4
Summary: Very good, with higher hopes for the next edition
Comment: I'm sad that I can't give this book 5 stars because the quality is there. I would have liked additional examples of programming for Unicode. Java is easy because Unicode is its native character set. But I work in C++, C, SQL, Perl and shell scripts too. A few pages dedicated to each of these (and perhaps some other languages in common use) would be of great help. Some of the issues I'd like to see addressed are:
1) The preferred data type(s) for representing Unicode characters in each language.
2) Library functions to avoid and alternatives to each.
3) Reading and writing common encodings (UTF-8 and UCS-16 are the big ones).
4) Conversion between Unicode and other character sets.
The addition of this material in future edition would make this one of the most essential books on the shelf of anyone developing software for the international market. As it stands, it is still a fine book. If you are a programmer doing internationalization, it is worth owning.
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Title: Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard by Richard Gillam ISBN: 0201700522 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: CJKV Information Processing by Ken Lunde ISBN: 1565922247 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $69.95 |
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Title: The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0 by The Unicode Consortium, Joan Aliprand, Julie Allen, Joe Becker, Mark Davis, Michael Everson, Asmus Freytag, John Jenkins, Mike Ksar, Rick McGowan ISBN: 0321185781 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 29 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $74.99 |
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Title: Developing International Software, Second Edition by Dr. International ISBN: 0735615837 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 09 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $69.99 |
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Title: XML Internationalization and Localization by Yves Savourel ISBN: 0672320967 Publisher: SAMS Pub. Date: 26 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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