From the book lists at Adware Report:

 All information current as of 13:22:27 Pacific Time, Monday, 4 April 2005.

Unicode: A Primer

   by Tony Graham

  Paperback:
    Wiley
    22 March, 2000

   US$16.49   

   Usually ships in 24 hours

Click the button below to . . .

    
(which will add the book to your Amazon U.S.A. "Shopping Cart")

. . . or use your browser's Back button to return to the search-list page.
Editorial description(s):

Review
"For developers who plan to use the Unicode Standard, this is the best companion book so far." —Rick McGowan, Unicode Consortium


Book Info
Describes the development of the standard through Version 3.0 and shows how to apply Unicode in projects. A detailed account of how Unicode works and detailed advice on how to use Unicode. Softcover.


From the Publisher
Unicode: A Primer helps you:

Understand Unicode 3.0 and ISO/IEC 10646 basics

Explore Unicode structure, properties, and encodings

Unleash Unicode in HTML, XML, and HTTP

Find out how Windows, Unix, and Mac OS support Unicode

Use Unicode with C/C++, Perl, Java, VB, and other languages

Tour the character blocks in Unicode 3.0

Companion Web site with updates and sample code!!!


From the Back Cover
"For developers who plan to use the Unicode Standard, this is the best companion book so far." —Rick McGowan, Unicode Consortium

Whether you're a Web developer or a programmer, the Unicode Standard enables consistent handling of English text, Chinese and Japanese ideographs, Korean Hanjul characters, and most other major scripts of the world — an increasingly important consideration in today's multilingual global marketplace

Filled with lucid explanations and examples, Unicode: A Primer describes the development of the standard through Version 3.0 and shows you how to apply Unicode in your own projects. From a detailed account of how Unicode works to detailed advice on how to use Unicode in Web development and programming, this incisive guide is just what you need to take advantage of this increasingly important standard. Companion Web site with updates and sample code.


About the Author
TONY GRAHAM is a Specialist member of the Unicode Consortium and a Senior Consultant at Mulberry Technologies, Inc. He developed an interest in character set while working in Japan from 1991 to 1995.


Book Description
Whether you're a Web developer or programmer, the Unicode Standard enables consistent handling of English text, Chinese and Japanese ideographs, Korean Hanjul characters, and most other major scripts of the world -- an increasingly important consideration in today's multilingual global marketplace. Filled with lucid explanations and examples, Unicode: A Primer describes the development of the standard through Version 3.0 and shows you how to apply Unicode in your own projects. From a detailed account of how Unicode works to detailed advice on how to use Unicode in Web development and programming, this incisive guide is just what you need to take advantage of this increasingly important standard.




Reader review(s):

The Best Source of Printed Knowledge, June 12, 2000
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 !

Not a good source for fundamentals..., April 17, 2001
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.

The best introduction to Unicode I have found to date, July 7, 2000
Tony Graham has managed to put together an excellent book that is exactly what the title says it is. This book is the best starting point for understanding Unicode on the market today. With understandable language and easy to follow examples the reader is shown both the basics of the standard and how it can be used but also is shown how Unicode can be used in HTML, Java, VB, Java Script and other languages as well.

It is not however a manual for Unicode, if that is what you are looking for I would suggest you get The Unicode Standard 3.0.

Very good, with higher hopes for the next edition, February 27, 2001
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.

A good book about Unicode, maybe the only one, May 4, 2000
This is a very good source of information about the Unicode standard. Being organized as a primer makes it much more useful for someone who doesn't know much about Unicode compared to the Unicode standard document. It discusses the Unicode standard in depth, dealing with topics like bidirectional text and CJK. It also discusses Unicode implementations in Operating Systems and its support by programming languages.

Non-Intimidating Introduction to Unicode, December 9, 2001
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.

The only book I encountered about Unicode, May 3, 2000
A very useful source of information about the Unicode standard and how it is supported in modern computer systems.

A very good introduction to Unicode., October 31, 2000
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.
{end of page}

(Page code from the SEO Tools, Toys, and Packages site)