Book excerpt: Fundamentals of Codes, Graphs, and Iterative Decoding is an explanation of how to introduce local connectivity, and how to exploit simple structural descriptions. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Shannon theory and the basic tools of complexity theory, communication theory, and bounds on code construction. Chapters 2 - 4 provide an overview of "classical" error control coding, with an introduction to abstract algebra, and block and convolutional codes. Chapters 5 - 9 then proceed to systematically develop the key research results of the 1990s and early 2000s with an introduction to graph theory, followed by chapters on algorithms on graphs, turbo error control, low density parity check codes, and low density generator codes.