Book excerpt: A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders offers in-depth treatment of the basics of speech coding plus the innovations to the basic methods that make the coders useful and efficient. It describes the fundamentals of auditory information processing and how they relate to speech coding, and shows readers how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all publicly available codes and choose the right one. It explains how to measure the quality of speech coders with objective, subjective, and perceptual measures. The book also shows engineers how to tailor existing speech coders and provides the building blocks to create new coders.