Data compression is used all the time by software engineers, but I suspect many do not have a clear understanding of how it is implemented. I believe this makes it a good topic for the book. @bhansconnect recommended the LZ77 algorithm. I have not investigated it heavily, but it seems doable in a chapter and it is a component of gzip which is also valuable. However, there could be another more suitable algorithm to use instead. I am interested in working on this if we decide to do it.
Data compression is used all the time by software engineers, but I suspect many do not have a clear understanding of how it is implemented. I believe this makes it a good topic for the book. @bhansconnect recommended the LZ77 algorithm. I have not investigated it heavily, but it seems doable in a chapter and it is a component of gzip which is also valuable. However, there could be another more suitable algorithm to use instead. I am interested in working on this if we decide to do it.