  A construction of expander codes is presented with the following three
properties:
  (i) the codes lie close to the Singleton bound, (ii) they can be encoded in
time complexity that is linear in their code length, and (iii) they have a
linear-time bounded-distance decoder.
  By using a version of the decoder that corrects also erasures, the codes can
replace MDS outer codes in concatenated constructions, thus resulting in
linear-time encodable and decodable codes that approach the Zyablov bound or
the capacity of memoryless channels. The presented construction improves on an
earlier result by Guruswami and Indyk in that any rate and relative minimum
distance that lies below the Singleton bound is attainable for a significantly
smaller alphabet size.
