I've never been good at math, but would benefit from an understanding of both Information Theory and Coding Theory. Can anyone recommend approachable resources for at least the broad strokes of either/each? I'm not scared off by the math, it just makes my eyes glaze and brain start singing the Meow-Mix song.
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in reply to @Captn-Arrr's post:
an off-beat recco would be Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Very much an intro to information theory disguised as a novel (or maybe 3 novels). it even has a symmetrical cipher embedded in it and an appendix with a perl implementation of said cipher.
another strat would be reading the wikipedia articles about huffman encoding, shannon theorem, and Nyquist limit, and just skipping the equations.
imo only the vibes matter anyhow, my bet is that no one is doing the shannon-style math unless you're designing radio antennas and wireless protocols. that said i think its an extremely useful vibe to get.
EDIT:
also here's the slides from a talk I gave to a non-computer science audience about information theory, recent bugs in crypto libraries and the SSL backdoor described in the Snowden revelations: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IAecVWy5HMV6QDeRrbhAWrCEAk74w9Yii3LB6g9nCDw
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