Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Bleeps over important content

The book attempts to provide a practical perspective without getting into nitty-gritty details of the theory behind error correcting codes. This limits its usefulness of you wish to understand FEC codes and how they work. Worse, its practical treatment has gaps as well, and one is left without the understanding that's needed to fill in the gaps. I went to study the C program for BCH codes in the companion Web site as well: its represents a sparsely commented "point solution" for a very specific code of short word length and is based on sophisticated methods that, while no doubt highly efficient, are only very thinly treated in the book. This makes it very difficult to understand what the program is doing, let alone to generalize it to other flavors of the code. I have found Shu Lin's and Daniel Costello's book "Error Control Coding" to be much more useful.