OT: excellent book on information theory

[Ben]

Hi Paul,

Dr MacKay was my information studies lecturer and 4th year degree
project mentor at university, about 5 years ago, and I think that this
book is basically the course notes we used then!

He is an excellent lecturer, and if the book is as good as the course,
it should be very interesting, particularly the error correcting stuff.

Very off topic I know, but it's always interesting when two areas of
interest collide (my time at university, and my love of python!)

Cheers,
Ben

Paul Rubin wrote:
> I came across this while looking up some data compression info today.
>
>     David J.C. MacKay
>     Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
>
>     Full text online:
>     http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/
>
> It's a really excellent book, on the level of SICP but about
> information theory, probability, error correcting codes, etc.  Very
> readable, and geeky (in a good way) at the same time.  The writing
> style is perhaps along the lines of "Numerical Recipes", though the
> format is more conventional.
>
> The whole text is online as a pdf, which is very nice.  The printed
> version is somewhat expensive, but according to the following analysis
> it's a better bargain than "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone":
> 
> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html