Covers all important topics in digital transmission at the intuitive level of physical systems. The presentation attempts to bridge the gap between communication practice and theory, emphasizing the interplay between modulation and coding and their receiver counterparts. KEY TOPICS: Emphasizes the engineering tradeoffs in signal design, energy and spectral properties of modulation choices, and receiver design aspects including synchronization. Presents expanded material on lattices and block coding theory and applications. Reed-Solomon and BCH encoding and decoding algorithms are treated at length along with applications to bandlimited Gaussian channels and fading channels.