The title of this book suggests a mundane subject, loaded with syntactic niceties and trivia about byte boundaries and pointers to pixmaps. Over the past decade, however, visual interfaces, digital images, and applications that manipulate them have grown to be a major part of the computing world. The independent development by companies, consortia, and standards groups of numerous different conventions for representing bitmaps and other graphical structures presents programmers, software designers, and users with a confusing situation. Some graphics representation schemes, such as PostScript, are actually general computer programming languages with extra features for graphics.

Brown and Shepherd aim to introduce order into the plethora of representation methods. They do an admirable job of explaining the conceptual background for image representation, color systems, image data compression, coding, and the (social) processes of standardization, both official and de facto.

The title may be slightly misleading to some people: the book says little about three-dimensional graphics, and it correctly makes the point that three-dimensional representations often do not permit ready interconversion. Yet the book could, but does not, mention CAD models, Renderman, PADL, or other three-dimensional systems. Consequently, a better title might have been Image file formats or Two-dimensional graphics file formats.

As the authors suggest in the preface, this book should be useful to those who wish to understand the issues related to file formats or who need basic information about any of the more than 50 formats summarized in the second half. It is not a complete guide to any of the formats, but the brief introductions to the various formats might be helpful. Programmers who have to work with different image file formats are likely to appreciate the clear presentation of the background and basics that this book delivers.