The File Formats Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Handy reference for parsing many popular file formats!
Review: Many of the files I've wanted to parse were graphics files and were covered by the probably-better-known Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (from O'Reilly), but this book goes beyond the file formats listed in that book to cover other useful formats like various database (dBase and FoxPro and SDF) and Spreadsheets and word processing (Word 3-5, WordStar, WordPerfect 5/5.1, RTF, AMI Pro 3-4). It's remarkably hard to find references to these various formats, especially all in one place like this. This book does cover graphics files, too, but that's not its principal focus.

There's a brief but useless section on SGML, but it doesn't do SGML justice; get Goldfarb's SGML Handbook if you want to know about SGML.

On the other hand, I found the description of GIF file parsing in this book to be technically superior to the description in the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats.

Overall, I like the style in which file formats are presented.

My copy of the book is dated 1995, and probably its main weakness is that is 5 years out of date. But I still regard it as quite a valuable reference for file formats that were already in existence at its time of publication.