Can anyone suggest a good book that would serve as an introduction to finite field arithmetic? I keep randomly running into it (e.g. this post), but don't understand it well enough to follow the discussion.
In case you don't find what you're looking for, here are all lectures on "Information Theory, Pattern Recognition, and Neural Networks": http://videolectures.net/course_information_theory_pattern_r...
I'd be remiss not to mention that the lectures are by the late David MacKay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500221
ISBN 9780521782807