This book provides broad practical coverage of information theory. It addresses the basic mathematical, physical and engineering concepts in a clear and concise manner. Later chapters discuss more sophisticated topics in greater detail.
Information and Measurement comprises 25 chapters and starts by addressing where information comes from. Chapters 2 to 4 discuss the fundamental subjects of: Signals and messages; Noise; and Uncertain measurements. The following four chapters address the acquisition of information. They discuss Surprises and redundancy; Detecting and correcting mistakes; The sampling theorem; and The information carrying capacity of a channel respectively.
Chapters 9 to 11 bring information theory into the real world and present the CD player as an information channel; the CD player as a measurement system; and Over‐sampling, noise shaping and digital filtering.
The following three chapters discuss Analog or digital; Sensors and amplifiers; and Power coupling and optimum S/N. Chapter 15 presents Signal averaging, while Phase sensitive detection is addressed in Chapter 16. Synchronous integration; Data compression; and Data thinning are discussed in Chapters 17 to 19.
Chapter 20, Chaos rules!, covers driven nonlinear systems and bifurcations, chaotic oscillators and noise generators, while Chapter 21 addresses Spies and secret messages.
The remaining chapters of the book discuss topics including: the problems with many bits, distinguishing messages, the meaning of frequency, and Frequency measurement systems. The book also contains two appendices that provide worked examples to the numerical problems and a variety of BASIC and C programs.
Overall, Information and Measurement is a light‐hearted approach to a diverse and complicated subject. Its well written and informative style makes it suitable for practising scientists and engineers as well as undergraduate and graduate physics, electrical engineering, and computer science students.
