Claude Shannon died last year, and it's really disgraceful that his name is not a household word in the manner of Einstein and Newton. He really WAS the Isaac Newton of communications theory, and his master's thesis on Boolean logic applied to circuits is probably the most cited ever.
This is the ONLY book of which I am aware which attempts to present Shannon's results to the educated lay reader, and Pierce does a crackerjack job of it. Notwithstanding, this is not a book for the casual reader. The ideas underlying the theory are inherently subtle and mathematical, although there are numerous practical manifestations of them in nature, and in human "information transmission" behavior. On the other hand, this is a work which repays all effort invested in its mastery many times over.