This book covers a needed middle ground between the more formal books on the subject such as Sayood's "Introduction To Data Compression" and easy programmer-oriented books such as Nelson's "The Data Compression Book". This book is an encyclopedia of compression methods that briefly describes the technique of each method, along with any required math, and then shows the algorithm. Code is not shown in the sense that there are no CompressionAlgorithm.cpp files included that you can lift without knowing what you are doing. However, the algorithm pseudocode is such that you should be able to translate any algorithm into code without much trouble. I know that this book has helped me. I would suggest that any true student of data compression methods use this book in conjunction with Sayood's book. Use Sayood to get the mathematical background that you need. Then use this book to read the details of a particular algorithm in plain language. This book is truly an undiscovered gem for most in the field and I highly recommend it.