Written primarily for senior undergraduate and graduate students, this book makes the subject of coding theory easy to understand. With a simple yet rigorous analytic and computational approach, it explains each code, describing applications as well as advantages and disadvantages. More advanced readers will appreciate the discussion of modern developments in coding theory and the coverage of stochastic processes. Robust and self-contained, the book illustrates the codes with more than 200 examples. Topics covered include Hamming, Golay, BCH, Reed¿Solomon, LDPC, Tornado, and the Fountain family of codes, as well as Galois fields, distributions, and belief propagation.