While this book at first appeared to be exactly what I was looking for, I quickly became disappointed by how hit or miss the entries are. Some entries are useful, while others simply waste space by going far to in-depth (for example, there is an entire algorithm that conveniently shows how to add pi/2 to the maximum axis to find the minimum axis of an object in an image). Other complicated topics are frustratingly over-simplified. The storage format topics are almost laughable; there are encoding and decoding details for macpaint and pc paintbrush formats that nobody ever uses, but entries for jpeg, gif, and tiff claim that the algorithm is to complicated for the scope of the book and point to outside references. The book isn't terribly useful unless you are well versed in the topic, and if that is the case then you probably don't require a book like this.