With the continued improvement in coding techniques and the implementation of these techniques, and the growing acceptance of error control coding, increasingly many systems engineers are incorporating error control codes into communication systems. However, due to the rapid changes in this field and the fact that much of the information needed to decide whether error control coding should be used is in widely scattered or unpublished sources, it has been difficult for the systems engineer to weigh the advantages versus the costs of various coding systems and to specify the parameters of a coding system when error control coding is selected. The purpose of this report is to provide a reference which can be used by systems engineers to aid in selecting and specifying error control codes.