Book excerpt: This book provides the first comprehensive and easy-to-read discussion of joint source-channel encoding and decoding for source signals with continuous amplitudes. It is a state-of-the-art presentation of this exciting, thriving field of research, making pioneering contributions to the new concept of source-adaptive modulation.The book starts with the basic theory and the motivation for a joint realization of source and channel coding. Specialized chapters deal with practically relevant scenarios such as iterative source-channel decoding and its optimization for a given encoder, and also improved encoder designs by channel-adaptive quantization or source-adaptive modulation.Although Information Theory is not the main topic of the book ? in fact, the concept of joint source-channel coding is contradictory to the classical system design motivated by a questionable practical interpretation of the separation theorem ? this theory still provides the ultimate performance limits for any practical system, whether it uses joint source-channel coding or not. Therefore, the theoretical limits are presented in a self-contained appendix, which is a useful reference also for those not directly interested in the main topic of this book.