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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Of all the tasks programmers are asked to perform, storing, compressing and retrieving information are some of the most challenging--and critical to many applications. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images is a treasure trove of theory, practical illustration and general discussion in this fascinating technical subject.
Ian Witten, Alistair Moffat and Timothy Bell have updated their original work with this even more impressive second edition. This version adds recent techniques such as block-sorting, new indexing techniques, new lossless compression strategies and many other elements to the mix. In short, this work is a comprehensive summary of text and image compression, indexing and querying techniques. The history of relevant algorithm development is woven well with a practical discussion of challenges, pitfalls and specific solutions.
This title is a textbook style exposition on the topic, with its information organised very clearly into topics such as compression, indexing and so forth. In addition to diagrams and example text transformations, the authors use "pseudo-code" to present algorithms in a language-independent manner wherever possible. They also supplement the reading with mg--their own implementation of the techniques. The mg C language source code is freely available on the Web.
Alone, this book is an impressive collection of information. Nevertheless, the authors list numerous titles for further reading in selected topics. Whether you're in the midst of application development and need solutions fast or are merely curious about how top-notch information management is done, this book is an excellent investment. --Stephen W. Plain
Topics covered: Text compression models, including Huffman, LZW and their variants, trends in information management, index creation and compression, image compression, performance issues and overall system implementation.
Review
"This book is the Bible for anyone who needs to manage large data collections. It's required reading for our search gurus at Infoseek. The authors have done an outstanding job of incorporating and describing the most significant new research in information retrieval over the past five years into this second edition." - Steve Kirsch, Cofounder, Infoseek Corporation "The new edition of Witten, Moffat, and Bell not only has newer and better text search algorithms but much material on image analysis and joint image/text processing. If you care about search engines, you need this book: it is the only one with full details of how they work. The book is both detailed and enjoyable; the authors have combined elegant writing with top-grade programming." - Michael Lesk, National Science Foundation "The coverage of compression, file organizations, and indexing techniques for full text and document management systems is unsurpassed. Students, researchers, and practitioners will all benefit from reading this book." - Bruce Croft, Director, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts
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"In 1911, Professor Lane Cooper published a concordance of William Wordsworth's poetry so that scholars could readily locate words in which they were interested." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
"In 1911, Professor Lane Cooper published a concordance of William Wordsworth's poetry so that scholars could readily locate words in which they were interested." Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
More and more computing relies on managing gigabytes of information, whether handling large texts or multimedia. The techniques are useful in almost every area of computing, especially for web-based applications. The book is therefore very relevant to all professional programmers (it includes code and detailed descriptions) - and it is written in a wonderfully clear style that makes it a delight to read. Everyone who claims to be a programmer should get it. If you are a student computer scientist, you MUST read it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
59 of 61 people found the following review helpful
The Wonderful Thing Is: It's the Only One
20 Dec 2001
Format:Hardcover
This is the only book there is that will actually teach you how to build an information retrieval system (aka search engine). It discusses all the algorithms and tradeoffs, and comes with free downloadable source code to experiment with. Some of the material is standard, but covered in more implementation detail here than anywhere else. Some of the material is novel: you won't find better coverage of compression unless you hand-assemble twenty research papers, and reverse-engineer them to figure out how they're implemented. But with "Managing Gigabytes", it's all here. (Although, after a particularly envigorating discussion of how to string together a bunch of techniques to compress their corpus and save a couple 100MB, I did a check and found you could buy 512MB of RAM for less than the cost of the book. Knowledge is Power, but sometimes a little cash is more powerful.) The only negative is that this book is not called "Managing Terabytes", as the first edition promised/threatened it might be. RAM and disk are cheap, but not that cheap, and for now terabytes (and sometimes petabytes) are managed only by NASA, Google, and a few others. I can't wait to see the third edition!
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Good introduction to searching/indexing in data.
29 Dec 1999
Format:Hardcover
MG gave a good introduction to the components of practical Information Retrieval (IR). You can clearly see that the authors have a genuine interest in the field! But, I would like some more theoretical analysis of the algorithms used(i.e. O-notation), and more focus on parallell implementations of IR systems. Another book related to the same area worth mentioning is "Modern Information Retrieval".
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Very clear, but misses some key real-world issues
14 Aug 2001
Format:Hardcover
As others have said, MG is a good introductory text for Information Retrieval. However I think it spends a little too much time on compression techniques and lacks a good discussion of incremental or on-line indexing. The book tends to assume that the set of texts to be searched is static - if new documents can be added or old ones deleted it makes the whole problem much harder and many of MG's techniques are no longer relevant. That said, I strongly look forward to Managing Terabytes (if it ever appears).
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