Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Very useful for studing, teaching and reference

This book is a very good survey on its subject. It has been a pleasure to work with it in my teaching and also in my research. One of its obvious advantages is its careful presentation of the basics on noisy coding and Shannon's theorem, which is neglected in most of the many alternatives. All further parts including the well written appendix are a detailed and useful source of information. For my personal taste, Chapter 2 dealing with noiseless coding could easily have been omitted, and instead, it would have been desirable to add a chapter on codes coming from algebraic geometry.