Overview In this chapter I introduce Borland C++Builder (BCB) and explain what it is about. I also devote considerable time to explaining the purpose of this book and the philosophy behind my approach to technical writing. Technical subjects covered in this chapter include Creating a simple Multimedia RAD program that plays movies, WAV files, and MIDI files. Shutting down the BCB RAD programming tools and writing raw Windows API code instead. Creating components dynamically on the heap at runtime. Setting up event handlers (closures) dynamically at runtime. A brief introduction to using exceptions. This topic is covered in more depth in Chapter 5, "Exceptions." A brief introduction to ANSI strings. This subject is covered in more depth in Chapter 3, "C++Builder and the VCL." Using the online help. Greping through the include and source files that come with the product and with this book.
In each step the LZSS algorithm sends either a character or a <position, length> pair. Among these, perhaps character "e" appears more frequently than "x", and a <position, length> pair of length 3 might be commoner than one of length 18, say. Thus, if we encode the more frequent in fewer bits and the less frequent in more bits, the total length of the encoded text will be diminished. This consideration suggests that we use Huffman or arithmetic coding, preferably of adaptive kind, along with LZSS.
UnZip is a small zipfile extract utility. It is written to be assmall portable as possible and is intended to be starting point for im-plementation of .ZIP files in non-IBM environments.Source code is provided in C and Turbo Pascal. If you port this programto a non-IBM system, I would appreciate a copy of the ported source andexe files.
