software engineering

This is an exhaustive text on practically every known technique used in practical error correction/detection. Every individual technique is outlined in a seperate chapter, with a lot of stress on the practical implementation issues, though it does go heavy on the computational nuances at some places.

This book shall require you to have a very solid background on vector/matrix math, and also Galois field arithmetic. Some basic knowledge of Communication System models is also recommended, though not mandatory.

The down side of the book is that it does not give exhaustive mathematical proofs of the various algorithms (It was not the original intention of the author in the first place, though it's inclusion would have been really helpful), and secondly, there is no comparative analysis of the various algorithms. In this regard, implementing them in C/C++ could be very instructive to the discerning student.

In contradiction to an earlier post which expressed this was a good book for beginners, I would highly recommend beginners and those with desire for practical implementation to buy Lin and Costello's book. This book lacks in the quality and quantity of its examples. It may serve as a good reference for the more theoretically motivated person (e.g., those in the academic publishing community) but if you want to own just one book, don't get this one.

The book is very well written specially as an introductory book. However, some important derivations & discussions are missing. Two examples:(1) there is a whole chapter on BCH and Reed Solomon decoding without the derivation of the Berlekamp-Massey decoding algorithm, not even in the appendeix. (2) When discussing different decoding algorithm, no effort is spent in quantifying the complexity of different algorithms. So, the reader has to take the author's word that algorithm X is simpler than algorithm Y. Current hot topics such as Soft decoding of BCH and Reed Solomon codes is not discussed, except for the traditinal erasure decoding algorithm. Similarly, iterative decoding is not discussed; instead we have the outdated Fano and Stack algorithms that are usually covered in older books.

In summary the book is well explained but the subjects are not well chosen.