With today's flood of data circulating on storage media and the Internet, compression of digital data remains an immensely important aspect of data transmission and storage. This essential explains, without theoretical superstructure and with elementary mathematical methods, the most important compression methods, such as the entropy encodings of Shannon-Fano and of Huffman, as well as the dictionary encodings of the Lempel-Ziv family. Irrelevance reduction and quantization for optical and...

This book explains compactly, without theoretical superstructure and with as little mathematical formalism as possible, the essential concepts in the encryption of messages and data worthy of protection. The focus is on the description of the historically and practically important cipher, signature and authentication methods. Both symmetric encryption and public-key ciphers are discussed. In each case, the strategies used to attack and attempt to "crack" encryption are also discussed. Spec...