Unicode Books

• Supported metacharacters for each language API
• Regular expression classes and interfaces for Ruby, Java, .NET, and C#
• Regular expression operators for Perl 5.8
• Regular expression module objects and functions for Python
• Pattern-matching functions for PHP and the vi editor
• Pattern-matching methods and objects for JavaScript
• Unicode Support for each of the languages

The book opens with an overview of Java's stream capabilities. (The author defends Java's lack of support for console input/output (I/O) since today's applications use graphical user interfaces anyway.) He shows how to open, read, and write local files in Java applications. His file viewer example presents data in a variety of formats. (This example is improved several times until it winds up supporting different international character sets by the end of the book.)

Next the author covers network programming using URL and network streams, including sockets. Sections on filters show how classes can filter out characters within streams. The tour moves forward to cover data streams, which permit streaming of Java's primitive data types. Details on how to communicate within Java programs using pipes follow. In a notable chapter, the author thoroughly explicates Java's support for encryption, including hashing, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, and ciphers.

The last portion of the book explains object serialization, which allows Java objects to save and restore their state, plus it includes sections on Java's support for data compression (and ZIP files) and multilingual Unicode character sets. (Java is prepared to handle virtually any of the world's languages with its reader and writer classes.) Finally, the author shows how you can format output in Java using its support for width and numeric precision APIs.

In all, Elliotte makes a good case that Java streams are a flexible and powerful part of the language, and certainly not a limitation. --Richard Dragan

• Part I introduces Unicode, with a brief history of codes and encodings including ASCII. Learn about the morass of the data that accompanies each Unicode character, and how Unicode deals with normalization, the bidirectional algorithm, and the handling of East Asian characters.
• Part II discusses font management, including installation, tools for activation/deactivation, and font choices for three different systems: Windows, the Mac OS, and the X Window System (Unix).
• Part III deals with the technical use of fonts in two specific cases: the TeX typesetting system (and its successor, W, which the author co-developed) and web pages.
• Part IV describes methods for classifying fonts: Vox, Alessandrini, and Panose-1, which is used by Windows and the CSS standard. Learn about existing tools for creating (or modifying) fonts, including FontLab and FontForge, and become familiar with OpenType properties and AAT fonts.

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. There are hundreds of different encoding systems for mapping characters to numbers, but Unicode promises a single mapping. Unicode enables a single software product or website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It's no wonder that industry giants like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andMicrosoft have all adopted Unicode.

Containing everything you need to understand Unicode, this comprehensive reference from O'Reilly takes you on a detailed guide through the complex character world. For starters, it explains how to identify and classify characters - whether they're common, uncommon, or exotic. It then shows you how to type them, utilize their properties, and process character data in a robust manner.

The book is broken up into three distinct parts. The first few chapters provide you with a tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. It gives you a firm grasp of the terminology you need to reference various components, including character sets, fonts and encodings, glyphs and character repertoires.

The middle section offers more detailed information about using Unicode and other character codes. It explains the principles and methods of defining character codes, describes some of the widely used codes, and presents code conversion techniques. It also discusses properties of characters, collation and sorting, line breaking rules and Unicode encodings. The final four chapters cover more advanced material, such as programming to support Unicode.

You simply can't afford to be without the nuggets of valuable information detailed in Unicode Explained.

--Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming

"For more than a decade, Unicode has been a foundation for many Microsoft products and technologies; Unicode Standard Version 5.0 will help us deliver important new benefits to users."

--Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft Corporation

--Sir Tim Berners-Lee, kbe, Web inventor and director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C)

--James Gosling, Inventor of Java, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

These and other software luminaries recognize that Unicode has become an indispensable tool for supporting an increasingly global marketplace (see inside for more acclaim). A comprehensive system of standards for representing alphabets throughout the world, Unicode is the basis for modern programming-- Windows, XML, Python, PERL, Mac OS, Linux--and every major search engine and browser in operation today.

New to Unicode Version 5.0

• A stable foundation for Unicode Security Mechanisms
• Property data for the Unicode Collation Algorithm and Common Locale Data Repository
• Improvements to the Unicode Encoding Model for UTF-8
• Rigorous stability of case folding and identifiers for improved interoperability and backward compatibility--enabling additional new ways to optimize code
• A systematic framework for improved text processing for greater reliability--covering combining characters, Unicode strings, line breaking, and segmentation

This new edition of Unicode's official reference manual has been substantially updated to document the latest revisions to the Unicode Standard, with hundreds of pages of new information. It includes major revisions to text, figures, tables, definitions, and conformance clauses, and provides clear and practical answers to common questions. For the first time, the book contains the Unicode Standard Annexes, which specify vital processes such as text normalization and identifier parsing.

These improvements are so important that Version 5.0 is the basis for Microsoft's Vista generation of operating systems, and is included in upgrade plans for Google, Yahoo!, and ICU, to name but a few.

This is the one book all developers using Unicode must have.

It makes sense that software should move easily between international markets in today's global economy. Java Internationalization is first and foremost a guide to the issues surrounding writing software for different languages. The first sections examine a truly fascinating sample of the world's character sets and salient features for outputting characters in software. (Besides European languages, the book delves into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and Indian character sets, among others.) Of course, you might browse an encyclopedia to look up all of these languages, but the book does a fine job of giving a concise history and description of each system of writing.

Next, there is a thorough description of the techniques and issues that surround creating software in different languages. Screen shots in languages like Arabic (which read right to left) provide a thought-provoking cross-cultural glimpse into software produced internationally. Issues in user interface design come next. (Even if you've designed software for years, chances are that this section will make you rethink the way you create user interfaces for international markets.) For instance, scripts in Thai have no line breaks, so detecting words requires using a dictionary programmatically.

Java's built-in support for locales (best described as geographical and language communities) comes later in the book. The authors show how to format text (and dates) for different markets, again using built-in Java APIs and features (like resource bundles). Properly designed Java software does not need reworking--only new translations of text and images to make it accessible to new languages. Short sections on internationalizing Web sites powered by Java (whether with Servlets or JSP) offer some valuable insight. The book concludes with a road map for the future evolution of Java 3.0 internationalization, plus a really handy listing of all Java APIs that have been designed with international support in mind.

All in all, Java Internationalization does justice to an intriguing area of Java development, one that is sure to be increasingly important as more and more software is extended to new global markets. Suitable for anyone who designs or manages Java software, this admirably concise volume cuts to the chase and is a worthwhile and very timely guide to how to get Java applications to new markets fast. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Internationalization and localization issues with Java
• Survey of the world's writing systems (including Far East, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Indic, and Thai scripts, with brief history and character sets described)
• Locale support in Java
• Using resource bundles for text and images
• Formatting messages (APIs and tips for different writing systems)
• Introduction to Unicode and character sets: searching, sorting, and text-boundary detection
• Fonts and text rendering for internationalized applications
• Guidelines and samples of user interfaces for internationalized software
• Input methods (and the Java Input Method Framework)
• Internationalizing Web applications--Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP)
• Future enhancements for internationalization in Java 3.0
• Reference for language
• Country codes and Unicode character blocks
• Reference for all internationalized APIs in Java

But CJKV Information Processing doesn't restrict itself to input and output issues. There's extensive coverage of the special issues that arise when you attempt to work with multibyte characters inside programs--especially Java programs, since that language is especially adroit at internationalization tasks. You'll find ready-to-use algorithms for detecting and converting characters among the various sets.

Almost half of the book is consumed by exhaustive character tables listing every CJKV character set ever defined by a standards body, software vendor, or other organization. Comprehensive is the operative word here--Lunde even gives space to 145 hanzi characters defined by Hong Kong's Department of the Judiciary. You'll find a full suite of keyboard mapping tables, too. With the same thoroughness and clarity that made his Understanding Japanese Information Processing such a hit among members of the Pacific Rim crowd, Ken Lunde provides an unparalleled guide to computing with the CJKV character sets. --David Wall