Error correcting codes are one of the coolest things you can do with math. In general learning math is important for the <i>knowledge buzz</i> moments and the general "tooling for thought" but all of these are a little abstract and hard to "sell." With coding theory, we have much more practical selling points: learn math so you can understant GSM, 3G, LTE, 5G, 6G,... Wifi, ..., satellite comms, storage like CDs, DVDs, BlueRay, HDs, etc.<p>The linked book is pretty good with lots of nice explanations and good examples.<p>For a short, blog-post-like intro to the subject check out this 9-page PDF: <a href="https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/error_correcting_codes.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/error_correcting_c...</a>
Read the linked book for the full details.
a typical hn post of esoteric theory that ppl likely upvote due to 'essential coding' buzzwords and stuff they cant understand. While there's some good content in here, posting a pdf of a some teachers lecture notes without additional context is just the HN equivalent of reddit karma whoring. At least provide a sentence saying why this is better than some other resource
I can highly recommend the late David Mackay's _Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms_. To my mind it's a much easier read than the above book.<p><a href="http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html</a><p>Associated lecture series:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLruBu5BI5n4aFpG32iMbdWoRVAA-Vcso6" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLruBu5BI5n4aFpG32iMbd...</a>
Madhu Sudan's books and papers are practically required reading when you are working on a grad-level course on Coding theory. Just in case you think this is a course on programming, its far from it. Coding Theory describes the math behind the algorithms used to transmit data from point A to B. If you are interested, jump to the Error Correcting Codes section for some fun times :)
The book could really do with a subchapter on convolutional codes and the Viterbi algorithm. Those are the stepping stones to understand turbo decoders, used in LTE.