An improved method of computer communication and networking with error-correction encoding and transmission using a punctured polar code construction that is based on polar code decomposition is provided. Advantageously, this allows sorting of a reliability sequence to be performed for a reduced-length vector to identify the information bit positions in the reduced-length polar code vector. Polar code decomposition is used to determine a number of information bits allocated to given reduced-length vector (e.g., K0 and K1). The polar code construction is a function of a puncturing pattern. In some embodiments, the puncturing pattern is a shortening pattern.