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We study the classical expander codes, introduced by Sipser and Spielman [M. Sipser and D. A. Spielman, 1996]. Given any constants 0 < ��, �� < 1/2, and an arbitrary bipartite graph with N vertices on the left, M < N vertices on the right, and left degree D such that any left subset S of size at most �� N has at least (1-��)|S|D neighbors, we show that the corresponding linear code given by parity checks on the right has distance at least roughly {�� N}/{2 ��}. This is strictly better than the best known previous result of 2(1-��) �� N [Madhu Sudan, 2000; Viderman, 2013] whenever �� < 1/2, and improves the previous result significantly when �� is small. Furthermore, we show that this distance is tight in general, thus providing a complete characterization of the distance of general expander codes. Next, we provide several efficient decoding algorithms, which vastly improve previous results in terms of the fraction of errors corrected, whenever �� < 1/4. Finally, we also give a bound on the list-decoding radius of general expander codes, which beats the classical Johnson bound in certain situations (e.g., when the graph is almost regular and the code has a high rate). Our techniques exploit novel combinatorial properties of bipartite expander graphs. In particular, we establish a new size-expansion tradeoff, which may be of independent interests., LIPIcs, Vol. 215, 13th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2022), pages 43:1-43:3