Professor Richard E. Blahut is Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the recipient of many prestigious awards including the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1998); the Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award and the IEEE Millennium Medal. He was named a Fellow of the IBM Corporation in 1980 (where he worked for over 30 years) and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Introduction to algebra; 3. Linear block codes; 4. The arithmetic of Galois fields; 5. Cyclic codes; 6. Codes based on the Fourier transform; 7. Algorithms based on the Fourier transform; 8. Implementation; 9. Convolutional codes; 10. Beyond BCH codes; 11. Codes and algorithms based on graphs; 12. Performance of error-control codes; 13. Codes and algorithms for majority decoding.