Written for professionals and academicians working in the field of communications, this work explains how to exploit simple structural descriptions when designing codes. After an overview of Shannon theory and complexity theory, chapters overview classical error control coding, with an introduction to abstract algebra and block and convolutional codes. Later chapters review research of the 1990s and early 2000s and introduce graph theory. The book can be used for a graduate course. Wicker is affiliated with Cornell University; Kim, with the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.