This book is the product of a fruitful collaboration between one of the earliest developers of the theory and applications of binary sequences with favorable correlation properties and one of the currently most active younger contributors to research in this area. Each of us has taught university courses based on this material and benefited from the feedback obtained from the students in those courses. Our goal has been to produce a book that achieves a balance between the theoretical aspects of binary sequences with nearly ideal autocorrelation functions and the applications of these sequences to signal design for communications, radar, cryptography, and so on. This book is intended for use as a reference work for engineers and computer scientists in the applications areas just mentioned, as well as to serve as a textbook for a course in this important area of digital communications. Enough material has been included to enable an instructor to make some choices about what to cover in a one-semester course. However, we have referred the reader to the literature on those occasions when the inclusion of further detail would have resulted in a book of inordinate length.

We plan to maintain a Web site at http://calliope.uwaterloo.ca/∼ggong/book/book.htm for additions, corrections, and the continual updating of the material in this book.