Design Theory, Second Edition presents some of the most important techniques used for constructing combinatorial designs. It augments the descriptions of the constructions with many figures to help students understand and enjoy this branch of mathematics.

This edition now offers a thorough development of the embedding of Latin squares and combinatorial designs. It also presents some pure mathematical ideas, including connections between universal algebra and graph designs.

The authors focus on several basic designs, including Steiner triple systems, Latin squares, and finite projective and affine planes. They produce these designs using flexible constructions and then add interesting properties that may be required, such as resolvability, embeddings, and orthogonality. The authors also construct more complicated structures, such as Steiner quadruple systems.

By providing both classical and state-of-the-art construction techniques, this book enables students to produce many other types of designs.

Containing data on number theory, encryption schemes, and cyclic codes, this highly successful textbook, proven by the authors in a popular two-quarter course, presents coding theory, construction, encoding, and decoding of specific code families in an "easy-to-use" manner appropriate for students with only a basic background in mathematics offering revised and updated material on the Berlekamp-Massey decoding algorithm and convolutional codes. Introducing the mathematics as it is needed and providing exercises with solutions, this edition includes an extensive section on cryptography, designed for an introductory course on the subject.