This book discusses the concepts required to understand the processing required in most aspects of text handling. This includes the design of text storage and compression algorithms, editing, searching, parsing, hyphenation, formatting, indexing, statistical analysis, and user interfaces.

Most chapters end with sections entitled Language Notes or System Notes, and Bibliographic Notes. The Language or System Notes relate the chapter content to specific programming language or software system implementations. These, along with the Bibliographic Notes, serve to give the reader the context in which to better appreciate the current chapter. Any revision of this book would have to include more references to innovative text processing software found on microcomputers. On the other hand, for a person with a background in micros, the end notes in each chapter provide a healthy exposure to work done on minis and mainframes.

This book is intended for use as a textbook at the senior-undergraduate or first-year graduate level. It requires a good understanding of data structures and structured programming principles. The algorithms discussed by the author are presented in a PASCAL-like pseudolanguage. Numerous exercises are suggested throughout most chapters.

As more people become involved in working with full-text systems (thanks in part to the appearance of the music world’s compact disk as a text storage device), more attention will have to be paid to exposing computer science students to this area. There have been few books on this broad topic. One by Tucker [1] is much less comprehensive, and is dated, although it is more approachable by the non-computer-specialist. My only disappointment is that the index does not include references to authors, languages, or software discussed in the valuable end notes to each chapter.