An efficient method of constructing irregular quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is proposed. In order to find the degree distribution with low convergence threshold, the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart is utilized to optimize the degree distribution of LDPC codes. Then, a modified progressive edge growth (PEG) algorithm is used to get the mask matrix with the optimal degree distribution. Finally, the parity-check matrix of QC LDPC code is constructed based on the mask matrix, and the shift values are optimized to eliminate short cycles. Simulation results show that the constructed irregular QC LDPC codes with optimized degree distribution significantly outperform the regular QC LDPC codes in the additive white Gaussion noise (AWGN) channel.