In my opinion, Fisher's book can serve as a very good tutorial to fractal image encoding. The first chapter, probably better known as the "SIGGRAPH '92 Course Notes", can be understand easily even by non-scientist and be used to code your own basic compression engine. The other chapters go more into detail and show how to develop your coder to a #1 compression engine. Unfortunately, you sometimes need to read between the math to get the necessary information. Anyway, after reading the book, I was able to create some nice code and to compress color images up to 1:25 ... 1:100 in seconds or minutes without problems !