Books about file formats

[Armus]

Searched amazon for "file formats" and found some books like: "Compressed Image File Formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, XBM, BMP", "Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats: The Complete Reference", "3D Graphics File Formats: A Programmer's Reference" etc.

Are any of these books worth getting in your opinion? (Yes, I know most of the information can be found on the net today but it's convinient to have all info in a single place(book) instead of having to jump back and forth between webpages...)

[finale00]

lol, used books from $0.01.

Books look pretty old but I guess that would be more useful since it probably focuses more on the simple basic stuff that eventually grew into today's monster.

You might find it online. For example: http://www.fileformat.info/mirror/egff/index.htm

EDIT: briefly looked over the one I linked.
It has a lot of details of a whole bunch of image formats and even explains to you what it is.

Looks like a great reference. I'd like a full ebook for that.
I wonder if someone already made one. Having to download 1k+ pages doesn't seem fun.

Chapter 3 is great.

[howfie]

Don't waste your money. Try finding the specifications. Most image ones are documented fairly well. For things like jpg you really need a cs degree to understand how they work. For formats that use deflate there are free libraries. Photoshop psd there is an excellent specification from adobe. Any book cannot possibly go into great detail as a full specification.

[finale00]

I don't think people buy books to look at specs, but to look at how those specs came together in the first place.