Consolidated Wikipedia Pointers for Checksums and CRCs

Here are some starting points within Wikipedia if you are interested in checksum and CRC background. (These articles also point to other places of interest.) Over time I hope to distill the practical application of all this in my blog, but for now these are reasonable starting points.

• List of checksum and CRC algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_checksum_algorithms

• Longitudinal Redundancy Check (XOR checksum): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_redundancy_check

• Overview of Checksums: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum
  
• Fletcher Checksum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%27s_checksum
• Adler Checksum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adler-32

• Overview of CRC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check
• More detailed example of CRC computation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation_of_CRC 
• Mathematics of CRCs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_CRC

 Related pages:

• Overview of error detection and correction codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_check
• Discussion of parity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit
• Check digits (it's like parity for numbers handled by people): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_digit

It is important to realize that Wikipedia is not necessarily an authoritative source. For this area it seems there is enough critical mass of authors, editors and reviewers to get the pages into reasonable shape.