oW should coded communication be approached? Is it about prob- H ability theorems and bounds, or about algorithms and structures? The traditional course in information theory and coding teaches these together in one course in which the Shannon theory, a probabilistic the- ory of information, dominates. The theory's predictions and bounds to performance are valuable to the coding engineer, but coding today is mostly about structures and algorithms and their size, speed and error performance. While coding has a theoretical basis, it has a practical side as well, an engineering side in which...