OT: excellent book on information theory

[Paul Rubin]

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