July 2016
Intermediate to advanced
242 pages
5h 51m
English
Content preview from Understanding Compression
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Preface
Data compression is everywhere, and it’s as utterly essential for modern computing as it was, when one megabyte was a lot, and data was transferred in kilobits per second. In a sense, we have come full circle, from antique computers with limited memory and bandwidth, to mobile devices with limited memory and costly data plans.
Fortunately, there are tools, APIs, and packages that can compress your data for you. Understanding how they work will help you to choose the right compression for your data, which will directly translate into happier users, cost savings, and more revenue for you.
Data compression is built on math, and let’s face it, for most mere mortals, math is hard. Like, really hard. Like, it used to be one of the hardest things about being a programmer. Imagine Claude Shannon, the father of data compression, who was really good at math, hacking away at some chalkboard, scribbling rows and rows of crazy complex equations.
What’s even more crazy, is that modern programmers don’t really need to know math. Any eight-year-old kid in the world can jump online, work through a tutorial, and publish their own web page or application before even enrolling in Algebra class.
And this is, we believe, why the field of data compression has been stagnant over the past 20 years. Despite the fact that two billion1 people are on mobile devices and regularly experience problems with memory capacity and poor Internet connectivity, data compression remains a semi-stagnant computational ...
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