From the reviews of the first edition: 'This monograph is a most welcome addition to the coding theory literature. It contains a masterfully written and easily accessible tutorial treatment of new and exciting error-correction codes, such as turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In addition, it introduces novel and promising approaches to integration of error correction codes with constrained codes as well as hybrid constructions of algebraic codes and LDPC. While these codes can be applied to any communications channel, special focus is given to the magnetic recording channel. Students as well as professionals in the information sciences will benefit greatly from having this monograph on their desks. I highly recommend it!' Brian Marcus, IBM Almaden Research Center "The book describes topical methods for soft-decision iterative coding ... in a very clear manner. It provides a unified framework for the decoding of error-correcting codes, constraint codes, and channels with memory. I consider a strong point of this book the emphasis on the application of these techniques to a combination of error-correcting codes and constrained codes as used in magnetic and optical storage, and highly recommend it to engineers working in signal processing for storage systems ... ." (L. M. G. M. Tolhuizen, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1051 (26), 2005)

• 1. Introduction.- 1. Soft iterative decoding.- 2. Digital communications.- 3. Applications.- 4. Overview.- 5. Notation.- 2. Message-Passing Algorithm.- 1. Preliminaries.- 2. Message-passing on graphs.- 3. Nodes and modules.- 4. Low-density parity-check codes.- 3. Forward-Backward Algorithm.- 1. Forward-backward algorithm.- 2. Turbo codes.- 4. Application to Magnetic Storage.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Magnetic recording channel.- 3. Performance.- 4. Other issues.- 5. Constrained Coding for Hard Decoders.- 1. Constrained coding.- 2. Concatenation.- 3. Lossless compression.- 4. Examples in magnetic recording.- 6. Constrained Coding for Soft Decoders.- 1. Constrained codes for soft decoding.- 2. Concatenation for soft decoding.- 3. Soft constraint decoding and modified concatenation.- 4. Combined constraint and ECC.- 7. Array Codes as LDPC Codes.- 1. Array codes.- 2. Soft decoding of array codes.- 8. Other Topics.- 1. Multilevel modulation.- 2. Potential applications of constrained coding.- 3. Soft interference cancellation.- 4. Other codes.- Appendices.- A— List of nodes, modules and graphs.- B— LDPC codes over non-binary alphabets.- C— Sliding-block codes for soft demodulation.- References.

From the reviews of the first edition: 'This monograph is a most welcome addition to the coding theory literature. It contains a masterfully written and easily accessible tutorial treatment of new and exciting error-correction codes, such as turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In addition, it introduces novel and promising approaches to integration of error correction codes with constrained codes as well as hybrid constructions of algebraic codes and LDPC. While these codes can be applied to any communications channel, special focus is given to the magnetic recording channel. Students as well as professionals in the information sciences will benefit greatly from having this monograph on their desks. I highly recommend it!' Brian Marcus, IBM Almaden Research Center "The book describes topical methods for soft-decision iterative coding ... in a very clear manner. It provides a unified framework for the decoding of error-correcting codes, constraint codes, and channels with memory. I consider a strong point of this book the emphasis on the application of these techniques to a combination of error-correcting codes and constrained codes as used in magnetic and optical storage, and highly recommend it to engineers working in signal processing for storage systems ... ." (L. M. G. M. Tolhuizen, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1051 (26), 2005)

• 1. Introduction.- 1. Soft iterative decoding.- 2. Digital communications.- 3. Applications.- 4. Overview.- 5. Notation.- 2. Message-Passing Algorithm.- 1. Preliminaries.- 2. Message-passing on graphs.- 3. Nodes and modules.- 4. Low-density parity-check codes.- 3. Forward-Backward Algorithm.- 1. Forward-backward algorithm.- 2. Turbo codes.- 4. Application to Magnetic Storage.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Magnetic recording channel.- 3. Performance.- 4. Other issues.- 5. Constrained Coding for Hard Decoders.- 1. Constrained coding.- 2. Concatenation.- 3. Lossless compression.- 4. Examples in magnetic recording.- 6. Constrained Coding for Soft Decoders.- 1. Constrained codes for soft decoding.- 2. Concatenation for soft decoding.- 3. Soft constraint decoding and modified concatenation.- 4. Combined constraint and ECC.- 7. Array Codes as LDPC Codes.- 1. Array codes.- 2. Soft decoding of array codes.- 8. Other Topics.- 1. Multilevel modulation.- 2. Potential applications of constrained coding.- 3. Soft interference cancellation.- 4. Other codes.- Appendices.- A— List of nodes, modules and graphs.- B— LDPC codes over non-binary alphabets.- C— Sliding-block codes for soft demodulation.- References.