Re: OT: excellent book on information theory

On 2006-01-16, 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

That made me smile on a Monday morning (not an insignificant
accomplishment). I noticed in the one footnote that the H.P.
book had been "translated into American". I've always wondered
about that. I noticed several spots in the H.P. books where
the dialog seemed "wrong": the kids were using American rather
than British English. I thought it rather jarring.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Don't SANFORIZE me!!
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