Customer Reviews

The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes (North-Holland Mathematical Library)

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

 

 

Certainly the best coding theory text in existence. Introduces the subject, as well as mathematical topics used in the study of error-correcting codes. It is also a very good reference for mathematicians and engineers--with summaries of current knowlege of many codes.

I find it a shame that I can't give this book five stars as it has been one of the definitive works of error correcting codes for over 25 years, but the Index is just really bad. One of the major types of symmetry is the self-similar Hadamard matrix and it isn't in the Index.

This book has some of the most difficult mathematics known in it,

and does an even better job of telling about it than the similar chapters in

Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften) (v. 290) :"Sphere Packings".

That a field of combinatorial arguments ( Golay, Leech, Mathieu, Hadamard, Paley) should be as effective as this

in coding as well as the geometry of groups is very remarkable.

Just a couple of years ago I bought this book online for ~$80 and now I see it's nearly doubled.

While I will agree that book is worth having for a reference, it is not a good book to learn from. It is written in a style that's very dry and it is in effect a long series of proofs and lemmas. Also, I wouldn't call this a theory book since it doesn't give a fundamental understanding of why coding works. It's more of the mathematical foundation of coding with lots of code construction examples. On the good side, it contains some original material and is heavily referenced in the literature. But it's really written for researchers and not engineers.