It is gratifying that this textbook is still sufficiently popular to warrant a third edition. I have used the opportunity to improve and enlarge the book.
When the second edition was prepared, only two pages on algebraic geometry
codes were added. These have now been removed and replaced by a relatively
long chapter on this subject. Although it is still only an introduction, the chapter
requires more mathematical background of the reader than the remainder of this
book.
One of the very interesting recent developments concerns binary codes defined
by using codes over the alphabet 1L4. There is so much interest in this area that
a chapter on the essentials was added. Knowledge of this chapter will allow the
reader to study recent literature on Z4-codes.
Furthermore, some material has been added that appeared in my Springer Lec-
ture Notes 201, but was not included in earlier editions of this book, e. g. Generalized
Reed-Solomon Codes and Generalized Reed-Muller Codes. In Chapter 2, a section
on "Coding Gain" ( the engineer's justification for using error-correcting codes)
was added.