We review connections between coding-theoretic objects and sparse learning problems. In particular, we show how seemingly different combinatorial objects such as error-correcting codes, combinatorial designs, spherical codes, compressed sensing matrices and group testing designs can be obtained from one another. The reductions enable one to translate upper and lower bounds on the parameters attainable by one object to another. We survey some of the well-known reductions in a unified presentation, and bring some existing gaps to attention. New reductions are also introduced; in particular, we bring up the notion of minimum L-wise distance of codes and show that this notion closely captures the combinatorial structure of RIP-2 matrices. Moreover, we show how this weaker variation of the minimum distance is related to combinatorial list-decoding properties of codes. © 2011 IEEE.