Essential Coding Theory

This is the webpage for the book for the course CSE 545, Error Correcting Codes: Combinatorics, Algorithms and Applications.

If you have any comments, please email them to

The plan is to put up a draft of the whole book sometime in 2013.

Chapters

Part I: Basics

• Chapter 1: The Fundamental Question. (Feb 1, 2013)
• Chapter 2: A Look at Some Nicely Behaved Codes: Linear Codes. (Feb 17, 2013)
• Chapter 3: Probability as Fancy Counting and the q-ary Entropy Function. (Mar 26, 2013)

Part II: Combinatorics

• Chapter 4: What Can and Cannot Be Done-I (Mar 26, 2013)
• Chapter 5: The Greatest Code of Them All: Reed-Solomon Codes (Mar 29, 2013)
• Chapter 6: What Happens When the Noise is Stochastic: Shannon's Theorem (Apr 28, 2013)
• Chapter 7: Bridging the Gap Between Shannon and Hamming: List Decoding (Apr 28, 2013)
• Chapter 8: What Cannot be Done- II (Apr 28, 2013)

Part III: Code Constructions

• Chapter 9: From Large to Small Alphabets: Code Concatenation (Apr 28, 2013)
• Chapter 10: Codes from Graphs: Expander Codes (Apr 30, 2013)

Part IV: Algorithms

• Chapter 11: Decoding Concatenated Codes (May 1, 2013)
• Chapter 12: Efficiently Achieving the Capacity of the BSC_p (May 1, 2013)
• Chapter 13: Efficient Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes (May 1, 2013)
• Chapter 14: Efficiently Achieving List Decoding Capacity (May 1, 2013)

Part V: Applications

• Chapter 15: Cutting Data Down to Size: Hashing (Mar 30, 2012)
• Chapter 16: Securing Your Fingerprints: Fuzzy Vaults (April 1, 2013)

Appendix

• Notation Table (Feb 29, 2012)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Acknowledgment