ImageMagick APIs (Application Programming Interface) are programming tools and libraries that programmers are definitely interested in. With the help of these tools, everyone can write his/her own image processing application for performing customized actions (See Fig 1-4). Some of these interfaces will be discussed with practical examples in the last few chapters of this book. PerlMagick, MagickWand, Magick++, and MagickWand for PHP are the interfaces covered in this book.
ImageMagick is an X11 package. In computing, the X Window System (commonly known as X11) is a windowing system for image display. It is the standard graphical interface on OpenVMS, Unix, and Linux systems although Microsoft supports this standard as well.
This means that we can use ImageMagick in any platform that supports X11. So using ImageMagick, we can display any image on any workstation screen running an X server.
From a programmer's point of view, ImageMagick is a very flexible and portable package. As it has been written in the portable C programming language it will compile with any modern C compiler and no proprietary toolkits are required. Hence, every system can support it.