A Short Course on Error-Correcting Codes

When digital data are transmitted over a noisy channel, it is important to have a mechanism allowing recovery against a limited number of errors. Normally, a user string of 0's and 1's, called bits, is encoded by adding a number of redundant bits to it. When the receiver attempts to reconstruct the original message sent, it starts by examining a possibly corrupted version of the encoded message, and then makes a decision. This process is called the decoding. The purpose of this course is giving an introduction to the theory and practice of error-correcting codes.