Error Control Coding, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: very useful for both beginners and experts
Review: a very detailed book for getting into Galois field arithmetics, cyclic codes, convolutional codes, ... As a very beginner I had no big problems understanding the content. I am not the type of guy who could understand just by reading the theory - this book gives a lot of very useful examples, so you could call it fun reading it!

Rating:
Summary: more complex than Shu Lin's 1970 book
Review: I bought this book after reading the first few chapters of Shu Lin's "An Introduction to Error Correcting Codes" pub in 1970. Since that was very understandable (but unavailable), I opted for this one. Alas, I got bogged down in the additional math almost immediately. This is a bit heavy duty stuff for learning on your own. Maybe I can find a class some day and get through the wall of fire.

Rating:
Summary: very useful for both beginners and experts
Review: I bought this book after reading the first few chapters of Shu Lin's "An Introduction to Error Correcting Codes" pub in 1970. Since that was very understandable (but unavailable), I opted for this one. Alas, I got bogged down in the additional math almost immediately. This is a bit heavy duty stuff for learning on your own. Maybe I can find a class some day and get through the wall of fire.

Rating:
Summary: Foremost book in the field
Review: I had the previous version of this book as my text at USC. This version is a huge improvement over the last one. This one covers all the new advances and adds emphasis on the use of coding to communications channels. A complaint I had of the last version was that it under-emphasized coding gains and Eb/N0 vs. BER performance figures. This book has overcome many of those difficulties. It is still a bit ponderous in places but then it is the only book that covers the material in this much detail, truly a Bible of the field. It is a great graduate level text and a must-have book for any comm engineer. Charan Langton complextoreal.com

Rating:
Summary: Excellent applications-based approach to Error Correction
Review: Lin and Costello produced an excellent text which is targeted towards engineers as opposed to mathematicians. The mathematics behind error correction can be extremely intensive and, with other texts, I quickly become lost in complex proofs. Lin and Costello present error correction in method, with plenty of good examples, which those who need to know how to apply it can understand and the gory details of the theory are not as important. I used this book as my introduction to error correction and it continues to be a great reference book. The only drawback in it is since it was published in '82, it stops at convolutional coding and does not cover trellis-coded modulation or turbo codes.