Customer Reviews

Principles of Digital Communication and Coding (Communications and information theory)

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This is The Book in digital communications at the graduate level. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction. Chapter 2 teaches elementary knowledge in block codes. Chapter 3 analyzes block code ensemble performance, and is the best among all of the books/chapters ever written on this topic. Chapters 4-6 entertains students and engineers who really want to understand convolutional codes. Chapters 7-8 are on rate distortion theory. Part 1 and Part 2 contains sufficient materials for a one semester intense class on block codes and convolutional codes.

What a bargain! This book use to cost $130+ before it was banished to publisher's oblivion. Now it cost a fraction of that. Thank you Dover!!!

Can I make a suggestion for a few other rescues? How about these three for starters:

1. Lucky, Salz and Weldon, Principles of data communication
2. Korn, Digital Communications
3. Biglieri, et al., Introduction to Trellis Coded Modulation with Application

OK, back to the topic at hand:

This book's title is a little misleading. Since it lacks in-depth modulation and synchronization discussions, I would not call it a Digital Comm principles book. It is, in fact, one of two truly great classic books on Information and Coding Theory. The other is Gallager's Information Theory book. What makes this book a better read, in my mind, is the better organization and more organic development of the subject matter. Both books exercise great rigor, so if you are not willing to invest the time and effort in digging into the math, this is not for you. There is much material here on error exponents of convolutional codes and it's use in proving Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem for convolutional codes. A topic rarely discussed in any book. Also a unique find is an introduction to the Shannon, Gallager, and Berlekamp, Sphere Packing bound. Although, this bound has recently found much interest in the literature due to the discovery of iterative codes, you'd be hard pressed to find mention of this in any book (very high intimidation factor). And this book in fact does a great job in striking a balance between block and convolutional codes in coverage with some data compression thrown in for good measure.

This book is for the very serious student - only. It is all math, and more math. There are no circuits, block diagrams, or any practical implementations shown. All theory. Not what I was looking for.

The book is a classic one in the area on digital communication. Even till now, it has the reference value for the engineers which are researching on digital communication. I hope I have a chance to read it.I believe that it can do a great help to me.