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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent source of information on Galois Field mathematics
Review: I purchased this book several years ago for the introduction to Galois field mathematics while researching CRC hardware. I've returned to it recently to help me understand GF again for implementation of a Reed Solomon codec. Other, reviewers have complained about this book but I think they sell it short. After reading dozens of articles about BCH/Reed Solomon codes I'm always left missing the point of the mathematics because they gloss over the important details. Like, why GF(2^8) requires polynomial math and what alpha is for. Since it is a cookbook there are lots of recipes for calculation which provide a **practical** basis for the development of the mathematical concepts. Let's face it -- polynomial arithmetic is strange and this book really helped me to get a grip on it. I'm now better equiped to handle all the journal articles and books on the subject of error control coding.As for the C++/C routines...I haven't tried any of them so I don't know about bugs/issues with them. However, if you take the time to follow and understand the mathematics I'll bet you could easily fix the code. I would agree that this book isn't going to be the quick fix to get you a Reed-Solomon Codec or Viterbi decoder for free. I paid $55 for my brand new copy. $155 is a mighty high price to pay for ANY book regardless of a 5-star review or not!
Rating: 
Summary: A book hard to cook
Review: There are a lot of typing errors and crucial information missed in this book. And the C/C++ routines come with this book do not work properly.
Rating: 
Summary: coverage on Reed Solomon is not very good
Review: This book is marketed several places as a good cookbook for Reed Solomon coding and just plug in some subroutines and you have an encoder or decoder. It cover binary BCH codes pretty well, but when it gets to REEd-Solomon it glosses over it and gives one useless example. It would have only taken a few more pages to make this a whole lot more useful for me, I am some what new to coding, but not an idiot and had to read it several times to get the point on binary BCH code arithmetic, but as far as non-binary I am still looking. I haven't looked at the Viterbi algorithm or convolutional codes maybe I will report more later
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