Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images (Electrical Engineering) |  | Authors: Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell
Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers
List Price: $75.95
Buy Used: $18.99
You Save: $56.96 (75%)
Used (3) from $18.99
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 429
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 10 x 7.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0442018630
Dewey Decimal Number: 651.50285574
EAN: 9780442018634
Condition: 1994 hardcover, FIRST EDITION, a little wear to corners, previous owner's name, a little highlighting
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com 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 organized 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 hardcover 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.
Product Description
Offers both students and professionals guidance on large-scale information systems. This resource describes a new generation of techniques for compressing, storing, and retrieving information--both machine readable text and optically scanned documents. Appropriate for information science and information retrieval courses.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 one of the best book on search engineering April 19, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It has been 8 years since it was published and I could see it is still one of the best in IR field. Without much long magic equations, it is not hard for common user to pick it up. There are mainly 2 parts in the book, the first book is compression, most of them are just principle introduction since it does not make sense for the read to invent or implement an algorithm. The second part is indexing (plus some query) which I highly recommended because it is "practical".
The authors are smart guys who could do sth, google mg for their website and mg4j for the ported java implementation.
A Comprehensive Introduction To Text Retrieval Systems July 30, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A wonderful feature of this book spans out practicality for various topics including compresion algorithms and theory, document and imaging system and information retrieval. On my personal interest, the authors highlight a vast list of not only the theory but present it in a simple common sense logic.
There are several examples that break down complex processes into simple and easy to understand logic and the pages provides a smooth flow of the structured topics. Well organised, presented and fully informative.
Truly an ideal book. This serves as a superior text for students studying document and imaging systems, processing and information and multimedia retrieval subjects. Beautiful!!!
Just on a personal note, it would be great to see some emphasis in the future editions in regards to web mining applications.
Great Book on Information Retrieval May 3, 2004
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Managing Gigabytes is the best book out there on information retrieval. If you're interested in implementing your own IR system, there's nothing available that comes close to this book. But the book is good not just because it's the only one out there: the writing is excellent, the algorithms are presented clearly and explained well, and the coverage is thorough. Additionally, the coverage of compression algorithms is the best I've found in any book. All algorithms and pseudo-code in the book are presented clearly enough such that any competent programmer should be able to implement them. If all else fails, however, the free downloadable source code for the mg system can fill in any gaps.All in all, this is the best computer science book I've purchased in years. I wish all CS books were written like this one: it doesn't skimp on the theory or on the implementation details.
The Wonderful Thing Is: It's the Only One December 20, 2001
50 out of 52 found this review helpful
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!
 Very clear, but misses some key real-world issues August 14, 2001
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
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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