Codes - An Introduction To Information Communication And Cryptography

Information is an important feature of the modern world. Mathematical techniques underlie the devices that we use to handle it, for example, mobile phones, digital cameras, and personal computers. This book is an integrated introduction to the mathematics of coding, that is, replacing information expressed in symbols, such as a natural language or a sequence of bits, by another message using (possibly) different symbols. There are three main reasons for doing this: economy, reliability, and security, and each is covered in detail. Only a modest mathematical background is assumed, the mathematical theory being introduced at a level that enables the basic problems to be stated carefully, but without unnecessary abstraction.