Customer Reviews

Communication Systems Engineering

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Good:
1. Coverage is good, focuses on the trend of communication, which is digital communication. Author is not verbal, goes quickly to the point.

2. Shows you the conceptual views of the systems that implements the communication blocks.

3. Excellent plots available that compare the performances of various modulation techniques.

4. I must admit that chapter 4 (random process and probability) is a very well written chapter. It summarizes three important concepts in communication engineering, and these are Gaussian process, bandpass process, and white-noise process. The proofs to the theorems are well-presented and the organization of the chapter is logical. This is the strongest side of the book because without a good understanding of probability, there is no way to understand communication system. A+ for this!

Downside:

As it is with any book, there are the ups and the downs...here I present the major problems with this book.

1. WAY TOO MANY typos - If you read chapter 7 carefully by following the derivations, you will discover there are just TONS of typos. In fact on some pages, you can find more than 2 typos and on average there is roughly 1 typo every 2 page. I also tried to search online for the errata page, but was unsuccessful. It seems like the author doesn't even bother to put up such an errata page. This IS the reason that I gave it TWO STARS. How can anyone learn anything from this book if there are just so many typos in the book? I had the book by Sklar, which is much "cleaner" than this book.

2. Yes, I agree with all the previous reviewers that there is ALMOST NO examples in this book. The author simply presents theory and that's it! Especially in chapter 9 (channel coding), the author really needs to put in there some examples of how to work with linear coding and convolutional coding.

3. And yes, I agree with what most people are saying. This book is NOT a first book on communication system. If this is your first course in communication system and your Prof chose this book, you better hope you've got a good teacher. By simply reading this book, you still won't get too much out of it. Personally, this is the first book I read on communication system. I found myself continuously referring to books by Lathi, Sklar and Ziemer. However, if you have been previously exposed to this field and if you don't read it too carefully into the math (WAY TOO MANY Typos), I do think this book can potentially be valuable.

4. Take a look at another book written by the same author Proakis, titled "Digital Communication" and compare with this book "Communication Systems Engineering". You will DISCOVER one thing: When Proakis wrote this
"Communication Systems Engineering" book, he simply cut and paste the pages from that "Digital Communication" book or it is probably the other way around. So don't waste your money buying both of these books, for if you have limited amount of cash, just get the book "Digital Communication" by the same author. It is more mathematically fullfilling and there is at least an errata page available online! Reading "Communication Systems Engineering" feels like reading the summary of Proakis's other book. It does not make sense.


Conclusion:
No, I do NOT recommend this book at all. The reason this book is chosen by many Professors is probably because Proakis is a renowned researcher in this field and has written several books in such related field, and this book has been around for a while. From student's perspective, we do NOT care about this fact at all, we just need a book that can fill the gaps in our understandings, a book that has examples that "teach" us by "showing" us how it works and this book simply fails miserably in doing this.

Trust me, take a look at the book by Sklar. Also trust Amazon ratings. This book receives 3/5 stars on Amazon and that tells you something. Book by Sklar receives much higher ratings!

Many of the bad marks for this book come from people using it to learn digital communications for the first time. However, I think its pretty good as a review text: it clearly and concisely covers the important concepts. It also manages to give a better feel of the theory from an application point of view, though their treatment of magnetic recording does not accurately describe important implementation details.

My only knock on the book is that it would be well served by having more examples.

Still, a better book as an overview is "Digital Communications" by Bernard Sklar.

The back cover says this book "is primarily intended for use as a text for a first course in communications, or as a comprehensive reference for practicing engineers". I think it accomplished half of that. If you already know the material its a pretty good as a reference. For a first course in communications, its not a good text book. The examples and proofs were poor. There just seemed to be a lot of holes in the material. Even the Prof. teaching the course suggested we look to other text books because of problems with this one.

I don't know how they fit so much great stuff in this book. I bought it for a class - communications II at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but then I noticed that it actually TOLD me about stuff I had actually earlier SEARCHED the entire UIUC library for and come up empty-handed on. That alone gives it an A++++++++++++++ as far as I'm concerned. I mean, this book out of the blue tells me what I can't find in a whole library when I'm looking for it explicitly. It gives great information not just about the concepts behind various parts of practical information/coding theory and signal processing, but even gives some very useful hardware implementations of stuff, that before I never knew how was done. I mean, so you may see in other books all sorts of junk about multiplying 2 signals to convolve them in frequency domain, so multiplying by a sinusoid makes shifted copies. Big deal. This thing gives you a CIRCUIT with 4 diodes that actually modulates a signal by a sinusoid! Cool. This is one of the few books I've bought for classes that I'm keeping. If I'd known how cool it was BEFORE I bought it for the class, I would have bought it ANYWAY, even if I didn't then know it was going to be the book for the class! Such a deal!

This review is intended for college students taking their first courses in communications , and to departments of electrical engineering who choose this book as a reference for their courses. Ok, this book was the reference suggested for my first courses in analog and digital communications. In the first course (analog communications) the book was not helpful at all, and i think this is the fault of the university, since the book does not stress analog communications. However, in the second course(digital), the teacher's notes were so much easier to grasp than Proakis' text, because for a first course in digital communications, the student is not expected to have a background, and the text assumes that you have a background in digital communications. I also think that the examples were quite poor and lack application perspective. (by the way i got an A on both courses) Therefore this is a book that would be a reference for researchers and teachers better than for students.

I had this book for my intoductory communication class. Unfortunately this book is not for newbies as claimed by the authors or publishers. If you have previous experience with this subject, then this book may be helpful because it covers a lot of stuff. However if you are not very familiar with this subject, you will find this book unreadable and in some cases mathmatically incomplete. Also in several instances the book makes easy concepts complicated. One of the examples in the textbook which was solved by our instructor using about 5 steps was solved in the book with more than 15 steps. End of chapter problems are insane. I just wonder how the author expects us to do those by giving just a few trivial examples.
Bottomline is that if you have to buy this book because it is required by your instructor, then your instructor better be good and know shortcuts. If you are planning to buy this book for self study then I wouldn't recommend it. Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems by B.P. Lathi is a better choice as that book is easier to understand and more complete mathematically.

Definitely this book is not for a first course in communications. Although it is a book hard to study, that should not be a criterion to condemn a book. But it is not that, it is actually a poorly and sloppily written book.

The lack of examples is not the only defect. An almost total disconnection between the material and the exercises is immediately observed.
There is definitely a lack in consistency and style. Furthermore, the authors hardly care (or at least this is what is reflected from a careful study of the material) whether the information is communicated across.

Also the mathematics is hastily and sloppily presented, and there are small mistakes here and there. Anybody claiming that this is an excellent book should either have a very good knowledge of the material and really not trying to learn from the book or they have no clue what they are talking about.

I have a very complete Mathematics backround and was able to learn what I intended to learn but with a great deal of frustation.
You should definitely try another book to learn or to teach from.

I used this book for a "refresher" course prior to grad school. I considered some of the chapters to be breif in coverage, and as stated by others, lacking in examples. I have no comment on the later chapters on digital communication.

I bought this book as a reference for my second semester course in communications. Although I like Haykin's book very much, I believe Proakis handles digital comm. more thoroughly. After the first exam, my contemporaries started asking to borrow it!

This is a pretty good book. And unlike other have said, it works fine for a first course in communication theory.
The first 7 chapters are very good. However chapter 8 could use some major rewriting. I think it could elborate more on all the major concepts. In chapter 8 the authors progress too fast and don't explain the topics well enough.