Zstandard – Fast real-time compression algorithm
If you are interested in compression at all, be sure to take a trip through Charles Bloom's blog [1].  It's an incredible read, he covers everything from the basics all the way through state of the art algorithms.<p>A great example is this post [2], where he talks about how to correctly implement a Huffman encoder/decoder.  It's a lot tricker than it is made to sound in most books.  For example, most Huffman codes that are used in practice are length limited, to allow the decoder to use smaller lookup tables.  There are a bunch of surprisingly interesting tricks to get that to work well from the encoding side (which symbols do you choose to be smaller than they would be otherwise?).<p>[1] <a href="http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/</a>
[2] <a href="http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffman-paper.html" rel="nofollow">http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffma...</a>