Product 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.
A very useful source of information about the Unicode standard and how it is supported in modern computer systems.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
This book is not really current, nor is it particularly well written. Unicode Demystified is bigger and more expensive, but it’s more up to date, very well written and is an amazingly easy read.
Amazon User Rating: 2 / 5
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.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Amazon User Rating: 4 / 5
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 !
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5