6 Saving space
This chapter covers
- Reducing the size of data by compression
- Simple compression of text by substitution
- Advanced compression with frequency counts
As computers get ever faster, we ask ever more of them: a high-resolution film streamed in real time, a faster download, or the same experience on a mobile device over a slow connection as we have at home or in the office over a fast one. When we talk of efficiency, we are concerned with the time taken to do a task, the space required to store data, and secondary effects such as how often we have to charge our device’s battery. And so we cannot simply say, “Things are getting faster all the time; we need not worry about efficiency.” In this chapter, we will delve into one tool ...
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