Understanding Compression

Colt McAnlis is a Developer Advocate at Google focusing on Games, compression, and Performance; Before that, he was a graphics programmer in the games industry working at Blizzard, Microsoft (Ensemble), and Petroglyph. He’s been an Adjunct Professor at SMU Guildhall, a UDACITY instructor (twice), and a Book Author. Recently, he’s been teaching Android Devs the Zen of Performance. When he's not working with developers, Colt spends his time preparing for an invasion of giant ants from outer space. He’s also got a whole plethora of publications,videos and other things accounting for over 600,000 views.

Aleks Haecky is a Developer Advocate, Training Developer, and Writer at Google with a passion for bridging the language gap between experts and their audience. He has worked behind the scenes of Performance, Udacity, the Google Developer Channel, and documentation. In a previous life he translated herpetological books and taught kayaking. Needless to say, he's also working on the next Great American Novel and lurks on LinkedIn.

Chapter 1Let’s Not Be Boring
The Five Buckets of Compression Algorithms
Claude Shannon Is Infuriating!
The Only Thing You Need to Know about Data Compression
Chapter 2Do Not Skip This Chapter
Understanding Binary
Information Theory
Chapter 3Breaking Entropy
Understanding Entropy
What This Entropy Stuff Is Good For
Understanding Probability
Breaking Entropy
Information Theory Versus Data Compression
Chapter 4Variable-Length Codes
Morse Code
Probability, Entropy, and Codeword Size
Variable-Length Codes
Chapter 5Statistical Encoding
Statistically Compressing to Entropy
Huffman Coding
Arithmetic Coding
Asymmetric Numeral Systems
Practical Compression: Which Statistical Algorithm Do I Choose?
Chapter 6Adaptive Statistical Encoding
Locality Matters for Entropy
Adaptive VLC Encoding
Adaptive Arithmetic Coding
Adaptive Huffman Coding
The Modern Choice
Chapter 7Dictionary Transforms
A Basic Dictionary Transform
The Lempel-Ziv Algorithm
Collect Them All!
Chapter 8Contextual Data Transforms
Run-Length Encoding
Delta Coding
Move-to-Front Coding
Burrows–Wheeler Transform
Chapter 9Data Modeling
The Chains of Markov
Prediction by Partial Matching
Context Mixing
The Next Big Thing?
Chapter 10Switching Gears
Media-Specific Compression
General-Purpose Compression
Compression in Practice
Chapter 11Evaluating Compression
Compression Usage Scenarios
Compression Need
Compression Ratio
Compression Performance
Decompression Performance
Ability to Decode-Stream
Comparing Compressors
Chapter 12Compressing Image Data Types
Understanding Quality Versus File Size
Image Dimensions Are Important
Choosing the Correct Image Format
GPU Texture Formats
Vector Formats
Eyes on the Prize
Chapter 13Serialized Data
Understanding Common Use Cases
Issues with Serialized Formats
Smaller Serialized Data
Chapter 14Lossy Data Compression
Chapter 15Making the World a Little Smaller
Data Compression and You
Data Compression and the Bottom Line
Making Your Users’ Lives a Little More Magical and Less Expensive
Thinking About What’s Next in Technology
...Starting Now