I read this book while I was working on a project at UPC (Spain), which talked about Digital Television. It was specially useful in topics like MPEG, where Mr. Rao explained clearly the mathematics and other techniques involved in this kind of compression. It has to be considered a reference book since it has the information to build coders, decoders, etc. Personally, I think any engineer working on topics which involve image or audio processing should own this book.