Information and coding theory (Q4496853)

Information and coding theory is a book about one of the ``oldest'' topics in computer science: the question of how to transmit information efficiently and safely from a source to a receiver through a channel that may be instable or subject to losses. The problem itself continues to have new applications all the time; whereas initially it was considered mostly an academic question and later contributed to a ``safe'' transfer of disk or tape contents into main memory within a computer, today it pops up in the context of space exploration, weather prediction, electronic commerce, to name just a few. Essentially, there are two coins of solutions to the problem: Information theory, initiated in 1948 in a paper by Shannon, uses probability distributions to quantify information and to relate it to the average word lengths of corresponding encodings; the discipline argues about the existence and the properties of ``good'' encodings. Coding theory, on the other hand, is about mathematical, mostly algebraic techniques to construct such encoding. The book is from an introductory course on the subject which explains the basic underlying ideas, where a little more than the first half is on information theory, and the rest on coding theory. The first part covers source coding, optimal, in particular Huffman codes, entropy, information channels, and implications of Shannon's main theorem for using an unreliable channel. The second part, just two chapters instead of five, is about error-correcting codes in general as well as about linear codes in particular. The book is well-written, and readable with reasonable mathematical background. It contains many examples, the proofs of fundamental theorems in separate appendixes, solutions to the exercises, and a good bibliography. As such, the book can be recommended not only as an introduction to the subject for mathematics students, but also for students in computer science in order to exhibit them to a field of mathematics that continues to be of fundamental importance for modern information technology.