The author states in his Preface that “the book is based largely on a second-year course of about 30 lectures given to Cybernetics honours degree students” at the University of Reading. In my view, it is a very good basic text. The author covers the fundamentals in the first two chapters (Information and its Quantification, and Information in Language). The coding of information in noiseless and noisy channels, including Shannon’s theorem and information transfer, are considered in Chapters 3 through 5.

There is just the essential amount of mathematics used in the first of the text; students would need to have covered partial differentials for Chapter 7 and Fourier analysis for Chapter 9. Knowledge of probability and probability theory would also be essential. The author reviews signal and noise theory in the second half of his book, including the Fourier theory of signals and sampling theory. The last chapter of the book reviews some applications of information theory, briefly touching on television, telephone, teletext, and speech processing examples. Each chapter contains an adequate number of student exercises to which solutions are given at the end.

This book will go on my recommended reading list. The only cirticism I have is that references and a bibliography are not adequate (in spite of the author’s comment about the overwhelming and relatively unhelpful literature which is, as stated by the author, “very extensive”). One can also refer to [1] or [2], and perhaps [3]. Two references listed in the book [4, 5] are useful for economics students, and students of cybernetics should be familiar with these. There are numerous papers and cross references (to cybernetics and systems) that should also have been made available to the reader. (Perhaps my own work [6] should have been quoted])