Customer Reviews

The Art of Error Correcting Coding

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a great introduction to the topic of error correcting codes. It gives very simple examples to demonstrate the main concepts of coding and decoding for error correction. The part on iterative decoding needs more work. However, the exposition of Reed Solomon codes and their decoding is outstanding. I definitely recommend this book!

The book attempts to provide a practical perspective without getting into nitty-gritty details of the theory behind error correcting codes. This limits its usefulness of you wish to understand FEC codes and how they work. Worse, its practical treatment has gaps as well, and one is left without the understanding that's needed to fill in the gaps. I went to study the C program for BCH codes in the companion Web site as well: its represents a sparsely commented "point solution" for a very specific code of short word length and is based on sophisticated methods that, while no doubt highly efficient, are only very thinly treated in the book. This makes it very difficult to understand what the program is doing, let alone to generalize it to other flavors of the code. I have found Shu Lin's and Daniel Costello's book "Error Control Coding" to be much more useful.

I fully agree witht the previous reviewer. In an attempt to make things look simple, the author forgets that the objective of a good technical and engineering book is not to be just a cookbook for your kitchen where there are no deep whys, but to make the reader actually understand what is going on under the hood. This book fails completely at this, assuming you can reach the end survyving the frustrations, you will not remember the rationale for any single step taken.
A much better choice if you really want to understand the subject are Blahut's and Todd Moon's books.

This is a cookbook, as some of the above readers have commented. 200 pages that tell you what to do if you want to get something up and running. It is just what I wanted. What's wrong with that?

Coding/Information theory is a fascinating topic. I enjoy studying it. Incredibly complicated though too, and if you want to learn about algebraic geometry, extreme value statistics, information entropy, etc. you need a stack of 1,000 page thick books. Some days, it is fun to curl up on the couch and study this stuff. If this is what you want, maybe you should look elsewhere. But, on the other hand, if you want to get an interleaved RS/Viterbi communication link(as I did) or just about anything else working in a hurry, this book is just right.

The name given to this book is very misleading, one might believe its the seminal equivalent to TAOCP for error correcting codes, however it clearly falls dismally short.

The 2nd edition of this book still contains the errors and misprints from the first edition. The coverage and depth of the topics at hand are abysmal at best. Crucial topics are skimmed over, key facts and figures are never properly explained. An example of this is the chapter on reed-solomon codes, one could easily find better material on the subject simply by searching wikipedia.

The accompanying code examples available on the site revolve around decades old c code snippets which give no insight into the subject material and are cause for more confusion and misdirection (as most of them don't function properly to begin with). A far better book would be either Todd Moon's "Error Correction Coding: Mathematical Methods and Algorithms" or the standard text by Lin and Costello.