This document provides an overview of digital communications and source encoding. It discusses why digital communication is preferable to analog, describes the basic block diagram of a digital communication system, and defines key terms like the information source and channel encoder. The document then covers some of the foundational work in digital communications, including Nyquist's sampling theorem and Shannon's channel capacity theorem. It discusses ideal sampling and the Nyquist rate, as well as practical sampling techniques like sample-and-hold. The document also covers quantization, quantization noise, and how the step size and number of quantization levels affect the signal-to-quantization noise ratio. In closing, it briefly mentions pulse code modulation and nonuniform quantization.