bzip2 is a great algorithm for compressing data. It generally makes files that are 60-70% smaller than their gzip'd counterparts. This document will take you through a few common applications for bzip2.
Future versions of this document will have applications of libbzip2, the bzip2 C library which bzip2's author, Julian Seward has kindly written.
bzip2 home page: http://www.bzip.org.
bzip2 manual: includes low-level information about the library, and can be found on the bzip2 website at http://www.bzip.org/docs.html.
United States mirror site: is http://www.digistar.com/bzip2/.