Let's build a JPEG decoder: Huffman tables

Slightly off topic, but heck.<p>I was lucky enough to have David Huffman as an instructor at UC Santa Cruz. Very engaging and smart guy. He got a little tired about being asked about "Huffman Coding" all the time, given it was so long in the past and he had done a number of other things.<p>One of the things he enjoyed talking about during office hours (if help wasn't needed) was his paper folding:<p><a href="http://www.graficaobscura.com/huffman/" rel="nofollow">http://www.graficaobscura.com/huffman/</a><p>Gives a good example.

Huffman encoding should be a mandatory topic you can explain before you are allowed to write a web api.<p>I hate when people output json that's not self documenting enough because they don't understand that aReallyNiceLongNameThatDescribesTheAttribute and nam1 compress to functionally the same size once you turn on compression.<p>One API recently I saw had a few single letter names. I could still figure it out, but it was figuring it out instead of just reading the name.