Tackling a Daunting Task
Unicode: A Primer
By Tony Graham
M&T Books, 2000, 475pp.
$24.99
By Eugene Eric Kim
A primer is supposed to be an introductory text. In the case of computer books, however, what qualifies as "introductory" can vary dramatically. Certain technical topics are broad in scope, and require quite a bit of prior knowledge for the user to understand them.
Unicode is one such topic. At first glance, it's deceptively simple. Like ASCII, Unicode is a specification for character encodings. Fundamentally,
this means that for every character, Unicode provides a corresponding number. The number 65, for example, represents a capital A, 66 represents a capital B, and so on.
Unlike ASCII, Unicode is meant to be a universal character set, addressing languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, such as the Asian languages. Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it may seem. Supporting all written languages requires maintaining a mapping between a number and a character. For example, some languages are written from right to left, rather than left to right. The Unicode standard must somehow incorporate this and a lot of other information. On top of all this, Unicode attempts to be backward-compatible with many of the existing character sets for different languages.
While Unicode is an extremely important subject in this age of globalization, books on Unicode are few and far between. For this reason alone, Tony Graham deserves applause for his ambitiously titled Unicode: A Primer.
Text in Context
One of the book's strengths is the context he sets for why Unicode is important, and how it's relevant.
