Rating: 
Summary: The only book I encountered about Unicode
Review: A very useful source of information about the Unicode standard and how it is supported in modern computer systems.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a good source for fundamentals...
Review: 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:
Summary: Not a good source for fundamentals...
Review: 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: 
Summary: Very good, with higher hopes for the next edition
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Non-Intimidating Introduction to Unicode
Review: 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:
Summary: Non-Intimidating Introduction to Unicode
Review: 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:
Summary: Very good, with higher hopes for the next edition
Review: This book is a very good introduction to the Unicode standards. Indeed, it goes lot further than just being an introduction. It contains a wealth of detail and a lot of very useful references. If you want to find out about Unicode and see how it will affect your work, this is the book to get. If you are going to be getting stuck in to some serious Unicode based development work, you will need the official standards for some of the fine detail but you should also have a copy of this book as well. In that case, I'd expect that you would refer to this book a lot more than the standard. After a short preliminary section that talks about the need for a standard and the standardisation process the meat of the book deals in "Part II" with the detail of Unicode and, in "Part III" with some practical uses. The author explains things like the various UTF encodings for Unicode in a clear and readable style. He also provides a very useful set of cameos of the support for Unicode in various operating systems, programming languages and applications. There then follow a substantial set of appendices charting the Unicode codings, the character sets used and so on. I do have one criticism of the book. Despite the appendices, there is still a lot of material in the text itself that really should also be in the appendices. I'm thinking of things such as charts of mappings and details about the standardisation process. This is a minor complaint though and the reader will easily be able to step around these sections while progressing through the book.
Rating:
Summary: A very good introduction to Unicode.
Review: This book is a very good introduction to the Unicode standards. Indeed, it goes lot further than just being an introduction. It contains a wealth of detail and a lot of very useful references. If you want to find out about Unicode and see how it will affect your work, this is the book to get. If you are going to be getting stuck in to some serious Unicode based development work, you will need the official standards for some of the fine detail but you should also have a copy of this book as well. In that case, I'd expect that you would refer to this book a lot more than the standard. After a short preliminary section that talks about the need for a standard and the standardisation process the meat of the book deals in "Part II" with the detail of Unicode and, in "Part III" with some practical uses. The author explains things like the various UTF encodings for Unicode in a clear and readable style. He also provides a very useful set of cameos of the support for Unicode in various operating systems, programming languages and applications. There then follow a substantial set of appendices charting the Unicode codings, the character sets used and so on. I do have one criticism of the book. Despite the appendices, there is still a lot of material in the text itself that really should also be in the appendices. I'm thinking of things such as charts of mappings and details about the standardisation process. This is a minor complaint though and the reader will easily be able to step around these sections while progressing through the book.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Source of Printed Knowledge
Review: This book is what I've been looking for---it explains the "why" and shows the "how" of the Unicode standard. The explanation is clear and I have no difficulty understanding the contents. It also offers helpful information of the support by programming languages (C, XML, Java, etc.), showing some program examples and also lets me know the support for Unicode 3.0 by the various operating systems. It is also helpful in mentioning the differences in the various versions. This is by far, the best book that sheds light on the Unicode standard. If you want to know what Unicode is about... This is the book !
Rating:
Summary: The Best Source of Printed Knowledge
Review: This book is what I've been looking for---it explains the "why" and shows the "how" of the Unicode standard. The explanation is clear and I have no difficulty understanding the contents. It also offers helpful information of the support by programming languages (C, XML, Java, etc.), showing some program examples and also lets me know the support for Unicode 3.0 by the various operating systems. It is also helpful in mentioning the differences in the various versions. This is by far, the best book that sheds light on the Unicode standard. If you want to know what Unicode is about... This is the book !
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