Getting Started

When jumping into this guide, it’s important to identify what you want to gain from it. For example, if you’d simply like to familiarize yourself with different compression algorithms, you could just skim over the different algorithms and play with the interactive algorithms. However, if you’re interested in understanding each algorithm at a deep level and creating your implementations, you’d likely want to take more time to read each page section-by-section.

Though as a general guide, it’s a good idea to get started in the interactive algorithms section to get an idea of how each algorithm works visually by experimenting. After taking some time to see how each algorithm works, it’s a good idea to dive into the overview of algorithms and get started with an algorithm that interests you (Lempel-Ziv is a good starting choice).

Lastly, you should familiarize yourself with the reference section and skim over any subjects you feel unfamiliar with. This section acts as a quick reference about different subjects that will inevitably come into play during the understanding and implementing of compression algorithms.

Or, if you’d like to dive right in, you should start with Lempel-Ziv and Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski.

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