Coding and Information Theory— S. Roman

I thought that I will write a book review for the book “Coding and Information Theory” by Steven Roman but I think to write a book review I need to read the whole book. Anyway, this is one of the books I followed for teaching a course on Information and Coding Theory.  The students  attending this course have pure mathematics as background and for such an audience this book is great.  The presentation is lucid yet it is very rigorous. If you like Lemma-Theorem-Corollary type exposition (I like that) then you will probably like this book.  Like most of the coding theory books this is also outdated. If you want to know about the algorithmic aspects of coding theory then this is not a good book  (for algorithmic aspects, the best resource is Madhusudan’s 2001 lecture notes).  There are several typos and a few mistakes in the book. For example the proof of Kraft’s Theorem  [it contains a fixable bug – Ashish pointed it out], a matrix in written incorrectly in the Mattson-Solomon polynomial section.  But overall I like the book for its clear concise presentation.

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~ by bireswar on April 18, 2010.