The introduction of this Introduction is easy enough but it quickly gets into the details of more complex topics such as Reed-Solomon codes, finite fields and other codes such as LeeMetric and MDS. The book wraps up with presentations of Trellis and convolutional codes. There is an appendix on algebra but it is more of a quick review rather than sufficient background to understand the rest of the book.
Assuming you have sufficient mathematical background, this book will be invaluable in understanding a complex and extremely useful topic. Translating the mathematics to hardware or software will be a major jump but this would be impossible without the significant mathematical basis that the book presents.
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