<i><p>"Hard copy versions of the Unicode Standard have been among the most crucial and most heavily used reference books in my personal library for years."</p></i><p>--Donald E. Knuth, <i>The Art of Computer Programming</i></p><p><i>"For more than a decade, Unicode has been a foundation for many Microsoft products and technologies; Unicode Standard Version 5.0 will help us deliver important new benefits to users."</i></p><p>--Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft Corporation</p><i><p>"The path W3C follows to making text on the Web truly global is Unicode."</p></i><p>--Sir Tim Berners-Lee, kbe, Web inventor and director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C)</p><i><p>"Without Unicode, Java wouldn't be Java, and the Internet would have a harder time connecting the people of the world."</p></i><p>--James Gosling, Inventor of Java, Sun Microsystems, Inc. </p><p>These and other software luminaries recognize that Unicode has become an indispensable tool for supporting an increasingly global marketplace (see inside for more acclaim). A comprehensive system of standards for representing alphabets throughout the world, Unicode is the basis for modern programming-- Windows, XML, Python, PERL, Mac OS, Linux--and every major search engine and browser in operation today.</p><h4>New to Unicode Version 5.0</h4><ul> <li>A stable foundation for Unicode Security Mechanisms </li> <li>Property data for the Unicode Collation Algorithm and Common Locale Data Repository </li> <li>Improvements to the Unicode Encoding Model for UTF-8 </li> <li>Rigorous stability of case folding and identifiers for improved interoperability and backward compatibility--enabling additional new ways to optimize code </li> <li>A systematic framework for improved text processing for greater reliability--covering combining characters, Unicode strings, line breaking, and segmentation</li></ul><p>This new edition of Unicode's official reference manual has been substantially updated to document the latest revisions to the Unicode Standard, with hundreds of pages of new information. It includes major revisions to text, figures, tables, definitions, and conformance clauses, and provides clear and practical answers to common questions. For the first time, the book contains the Unicode Standard Annexes, which specify vital processes such as text normalization and identifier parsing.</p><p>These improvements are so important that Version 5.0 is the basis for Microsoft's Vista generation of operating systems, and is included in upgrade plans for Google, Yahoo!, and ICU, to name but a few. </p><p><i>This is the one book all developers using Unicode must have.</i></p>