PNG - Ideas to Integrated Circuits

PNG: The Definitive Guide
PNG: The Definitive Guide
ISBN 1-56592-542-4
Softcover
344 pages
$34.95
June 1999
(Out of print as of October 2001, alas.)
(Released online as of July 2003!)
By golly, a whole book devoted to PNG!
Indeed, PNG: The Definitive Guide is for real; Greg received his first copy on 24 June 1999. The book
is 344 pages (352 if you count the catalog info in the back), plus four pages of really cool color plates,
and the publisher is O'Reilly and Associates. (The cover animal originally was to be a "pnguin," but Tim
O'Reilly declared that they're reserved for Linux books. Argh, so close...)
The book is divided into three main parts and is targetted at both designers and programmers. Part I,
Using PNG, consists of six chapters and covers the main categories of PNG-supporting applications:
image editors, viewers, converters, web browsers and servers, and 3D apps. Chapter 1 also provides a
basic overview of image types and properties.
Part II, The Design of PNG, also consists of six chapters and looks in more detail at PNG as a file
format. It covers not only PNG's fundamental chunk structure and compression technology but also its
history, its animated cousin MNG, and some of the intricacies of cross-platform gamma and color
correction.
Part III, Programming with PNG (four chapters), steps the reader through the design of three functional
demo programs based on the free libpng C library: rpng, a very simple PNG viewer; rpng2, a
progressive PNG viewer such as might be found in a web browser; and wpng, a basic program to
convert RGB image data from binary PBMPLUS / NetPBM format into PNG format. The final chapter
in this section lists a number of other PNG-supporting programming toolkits for various languages,
including C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, tcl/tk, and Visual Basic.
Here's a quick directory to more detailed information on PNG: The Definitive Guide:
http://libpng.org/pub/png/pngbook.html (1 of 4)10/23/06 12:46 PM