For Further Information About Data Compression

On USENET the comp.compression newsgroup FAQ article provides a useful source of information about a variety of different compression methods. Also included is information on many archiving programs (pkzip, lzh, zoo, etc.) and patents pertaining to compression algorithms. This FAQ is included on the CD-ROM ; however, because the FAQ is updated frequently, the CD-ROM version should be used only for general information. You can get the latest version of this FAQ from the news.answers newsgroup at:

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.compression/compression-faq

where it is kept in three parts: part1, part2, and part3. This FAQ may also be obtained by sending email to:

mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu

with the message

send usenet/comp.compression/compression-faq/part1
send usenet/comp.compression/compression-faq/part2
send usenet/comp.compression/compression-faq/part3

in the body.

There are many books on data encoding and compression. Most older books contain only mathematical descriptions of encoding algorithms. Some newer books, however, have picked up the highly desirable trend of including working (we hope) C code examples in their text and even making the code examples available online or on disk.

The following references contain good general discussions of many of the compression algorithms discussed in this chapter:

Bell, T.C, I.H. Witten, and J.G. Cleary, "Modeling for Text Compression," ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 21, no. 4, December 1989, p. 557.
Bell, T.C, I.H. Witten, and J.G. Cleary, Text Compression, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1990.
Huffman, D.A., "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes," Communications of the ACM, vol. 40, no. 9, September 1952, pp. 1098-1101.
Jain, Anil K., Paul M. Farrelle, and V. Ralph Angazi, Image Data Compression: Digital Image Processing Techniques, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1984, pp. 171-226.
Lelewer, D.A, and D.S. Hirschberg, "Data Compression," ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 19, no. 3, September 1987, p. 261.
Storer, James A., Data Compression: Methods and Theory, Computer Science Press, Rockville, MD, 1988.
Storer, James A., ed., Image and Text Compression, Kluwer Books, Boston, MA, 1992.
Williams, R., Adaptive Data Compression, Kluwer Books, Boston, MA, 1990, pp. 30-44.