Two Lectures on Iterative Coding and Statistical Mechanics
  These are the notes for two lectures delivered at the Les Houches summer school Mathematical Statistical Mechanics, held in July 2005.   I review some basic notions on sparse graph error correcting codes with emphasis on `modern' aspects, such as, iterative belief propagation decoding. Relations with statistical mechanics, inference and random combinatorial optimization are stressed, as well as some general mathematical ideas and open problems. 
Andrea Montanari