This rather large volume is organized into three largely independent parts, plus over 100 pages containing a glossary and index. The first part covers what Unicode is, the second gives an overview of all of the character sets covered by Unicode, and the last covers use of Unicode. Each of these three parts could function as a stand-alone, smaller text; it would have served the end-user better if they had been presented in this manner.

The first part, which is an overview of the Unicode standard, is the most useful to an actual developer working with Unicode. This also is the part that would have benefited most from being published as a separate manual: the examples are excellent, and there is a good overview of what is in Unicode and where to find it, but the text is marred slightly by forward references to later parts of the book, which makes some of the explanations disjointed. In addition, some important information that would have been included here is not covered until a relevant script is introduced in Part 2. Some significant examples of this are bi-directional ordering, ideographic description sequences, punctuation, and numbers.

Part 2 is an excellent overview of the alphabets and scripts supported by the Unicode 3 standard (specifically, Unicode 3.1, and what was at the time the proposal for Unicode 3.2). Almost 300 pages of the book are devoted to this topic, and they are an excellent reference. Most are fully illustrated, and the history, particulars of appearance, and ordering are well done.

The third part, containing detailed descriptions of Unicode-handling algorithms and data structures, is the weakest part of the book, mostly because of the strong focus on optimization. This tends to make the discussion of the topics less clear, and blurs the line between Unicode and general programming techniques. An appendix on optimization of Unicode algorithms and data structures would have made the description of the Unicode-specific topics much clearer, without losing the important topics touched on in the optimization discussions. While Part 3 would be very useful to someone implementing a Unicode application program interface (API), it is only of minimal use to a typical programmer.

This book would be an excellent choice for someone looking for supplemental Unicode reference material, but is probably not as good of a choice for a general programmer who is looking to build Unicode support into their software. The extensive historical information and the colloquial style make it excellent reading material, but as a result it does not function quite as well as a reference on Unicode itself, the exception being the overview of alphabets and scripts. While listed on the back cover as one of the six major topics covered by the book, the section on use of Unicode on the Internet and within programming languages and operating systems is really just a bird’s eye overview of the state of the art.