From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@icu-project.org)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2006 - 11:20:47 CDT
For those who read French, there is also the excellent recent
book:Passeport pour Unicodeby Bernard Desgraupes.
But for the issue that started off this thread -- the GTZ not using Unicode
-- I don't think any of these books were really applicable. What is needed
is a guide for "development agencies", which would be really more of a short
white paper outlining the issues at a very high level. It'd be great if one
of the people on this thread stepped up to the plate, and submitted a
technical note on the topic. (http://www.unicode.org/notes/).
For general-purpose books, I think part of the problem is determining the
audience to target. Let's take the issue of normalization and equivalance,
for example. It needs a very different explanation depending on the
audience:
- Programmers implementing low-level libraries doing normalization.
These are the only people that need to care about the gory details of the
spec.
- Programmers using those libraries. If the libraries are well done,
they need to know much less about normalization itself, and more about the
library API -- and most importantly, when they need to call the
libraries. For example, they need to know that normalization isn't preserved
by string concatenation, and what to do in that case.
- Writers of specifications and protocols (W3C, IETF,...). In a
similar boat as #2, but for them features like the stability provisions rise
in priority.
- Font designers, who need to know certain facts about normalization,
but really much more about the font tools -- good tools will do most of the
work for them.
- Users, who are more dependent on how their software works than
anything else. and again, if the software is up to snuff, they don't need to
care about normalization at all.
- and so on.
Thus even if the audience is just programmers, the books needs to be
structured carefully to give people just what they need.
Mark
On 8/18/06, Richard Gillam <rgillam@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Doug--
>
> > What is really needed, of course, is a "Unicode for Dummies" book.
> > Seriously. Anyone who has read books in the "Dummies" or "Complete
> > Idiot" series knows that some of them are quite well-written, and
> > excellent at teaching new material to educable beginners.
>
> I'm curious-- as I'm sure you know, there are three books about Unicode
> out
> there already: Tony Graham's book, Jukka Korpela's book, and my
> book. None
> of them, of course, are part of the "Dummies" series, but I'm wondering
> whether you think any of them would serve well as an introduction to
> Unicode along the lines of the "Dummies" books, and if not, why not.
>
> I haven't read Tony and Jukka's books, although I keep meaning to (by the
> time I finished my own, I was pretty Unicoded out), so I'm not in a
> position to comment. I've come to think mine's too long to serve as a
> good
> introductory text, even though that's what I was after when I wrote it.
>
> Even if none of the current titles really hit the bullseye, is the market
> big enough for yet another Unicode book? I know mine hasn't exactly flown
> off the shelves.
>
> --Rich Gillam
> Global Name Recognition/Entity Analytics Solutions
> IBM
>
>
>
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