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By Jukka K. Korpela
June 2006
Pages: 678
ISBN 10: 0-596-10121-X |
ISBN 13: 9780596101213
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
Possessing everything you need to grasp Unicode, this comprehensive reference takes you on a detailed guide through the complex character world. Learn how to identify and classify characters, utilize their properties, and process data in a robust manner. Other topics include collation and sorting, line breaking rules and Unicode encodings. Perfect for both beginning and seasoned programmers.
Full Description
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. There are hundreds of different encoding systems for mapping characters to numbers, but Unicode promises a single mapping. Unicode enables a single software product or website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It's no wonder that industry giants like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andMicrosoft have all adopted Unicode.
Containing everything you need to understand Unicode, this comprehensive reference from O'Reilly takes you on a detailed guide through the complex character world. For starters, it explains how to identify and classify characters - whether they're common, uncommon, or exotic. It then shows you how to type them, utilize their properties, and process character data in a robust manner.
The book is broken up into three distinct parts. The first few chapters provide you with a tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. It gives you a firm grasp of the terminology you need to reference various components, including character sets, fonts and encodings, glyphs and character repertoires.
The middle section offers more detailed information about using Unicode and other character codes. It explains the principles and methods of defining character codes, describes some of the widely used codes, and presents code conversion techniques. It also discusses properties of characters, collation and sorting, line breaking rules and Unicode encodings. The final four chapters cover more advanced material, such as programming to support Unicode.
You simply can't afford to be without the nuggets of valuable information detailed in Unicode Explained.
Featured customer reviews
A well written book on Unicode and all things concerning it, February 02 2008
Unicode is one component around which it is difficult to write a "definitive" book. This one comes close. It is very good. Unicode is generally not understood well and more often than not, those who desire to learn about it have the unicode.org site as the reference. The site is good, but it is a bit of a kludge for daily reference.
This is a work that would come in handy for daily reference. For application developers worried about i18n and l10n, for web applications, for language computing students, Unicode Explained lays bare the details of Unicode in a most elegant way.
By providing a large expanse of real life examples, it provides immediate identification of Unicode issues and their impact. It touches upon the bits of encoding, characters with unusual depth.
For those who are familiar with Unicode, this would be a good reference for quick perusal. For others, the chapters around Characters, Encoding, Internet Protocols would be of tremendous value.
This is worth a place on a developer's bookshelf
Great book, November 06 2006
this book is explain the unicode very clearly.
thanks for the author.
Media reviews
"Jukka Korpela's Unicode Explained makes Unicode comprehensible. I've been working occasionally with Unicode for almost a decade, but I find I understand parts of it much better now that I've read his book. Unicode Explained isn't unique in its values; several introductions to Unicode have been assembled by passionate, deeply informed authors who handle the topic's difficulties fairly and with insight. Among these, Unicode Explained deserves attention as the most recent and the one that exhibits the most scholarly refinements. My recommendation, then, if you work at all outside the ASCII table or standard Latin alphabet, is to keep a copy of Unicode Explained at your desk. "
-- Cameron Laird, Unix Review
"If you have anything to do with programming or designing global software, this book purchase is a no-brainer. And even if you're not doing anything in that area right now, this is one of those reference titles that is worth having on your bookshelf and available for the first time you *do* need it. It won't take long to pay for itself."
-- Thomas Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings
"...this book is great for anyone who wants to know the details of Unicode. By reading Unicode Explained you can dig to various levels of knowledge: some of them are so deep that knowing them is just a matter of personal satisfaction, but most of them represent an essential knowledge for the programmer who does not want to lag behind."
-- Michele Beltrame, var/log/arthas
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"...essential knowledge for the programmer who does not want to lag behind."
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