This volume presents the proceedings of the first French-Soviet workshop on algebraic coding, held in Paris in July 1991. The idea for the workshop, born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1990, was to bring together some of the best Soviet coding theorists. Scientists from France, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the United States also attended. The papers in the volume fall rather naturally into four categories: - Applications of exponential sums - Covering radius - Constructions -Decoding.