This book is an evolution from my book A First Course in Information
Theory published in 2002 when network coding was still at its infancy.
The last few years have witnessed the rapid development of network
coding into a research ?eld of its own in information science. With its
root in infor- tion theory, network coding has not only brought about a
paradigm shift in network communications at large, but also had
signi?cant in?uence on such speci?c research ?elds as coding theory,
networking, switching, wireless c- munications, distributeddatastorage,
cryptography, andoptimizationtheory. While new applications of network
coding keep emerging, the fundamental - sults that lay the foundation of
the subject are more or less mature. One of the main goals of this book
therefore is to present these results in a unifying and coherent manner.
While the previous book focused only on information theory for discrete
random variables, the current book contains two new chapters on
information theory for continuous random variables, namely the chapter
on di?erential entropy and the chapter on continuous-valued channels.
With these topics included, the book becomes more comprehensive and is
more suitable to be used as a textbook for a course in an electrical
engineering departme