Customer Reviews

Fiber-Optic Communication Systems

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a very useful text and reference book for electrical engineers and others who are interested. Its definitely meant for the graduate students and trained engineers and not for the beginners. I used this book as a graduate text and am immensely benefitted as I often require to revise many issues regarding my research. Provides many useful comparisons and references.

Agrawal is very well regarded in the field and in general the book is solid. I am using this book for a graduate level Optical Networks class. The major issue is that there are a lot of errors in the book, especially in the problems.

Very good book! It contains a lot of concept about propagation in fiber optic. It's very usefull for people that has just started to study optical communication

... but a really bad book to learn from. The book is not written for students; it's more like a collection of facts pasted together. On the plus side, the material is logically organized, and this makes it very easy to find what you're looking for. (Which, again, is what makes this a very good reference book). And, the book is complete: everything you need to know is there - semicond. optical amplifiers, optical receivers and transmitters, optical solitons; the whole nine yards. But if you want a learning book, look elsewhere. From the back cover: "Students and researchers alike will benefit from extensive pedagogical aids including: (1) extensive reference lists for each chapter, (2) survey of recent research material for each chapter, (3) relevant end-of-chapter practice problems ..., (4) solutions manual available to teachers on request, (5) system design software on the enclosed CD-ROM."

Now, would you call these pedagogical aids? With the exception of the end-of-chapter problems and the CD, these are primarily aids for the researcher. What's really funny is that he calls the "solutions manual" a pedagogical aid, when it's not even available to students.

In short: this book is not written for first-timers in mind; it's more of a reference book for those who have already seen the material or if you've already had an introductory course.

The 3rd edition is published in 2002, but still has an extensive coverage on Coherent communication and Soliton. What a shame! Anybody knows that coherent communication and Soliton are dead since WDM became commercial deployment in 1996. On other hand, the author did not cover anything applications which are succefully beaten the coherent communication and Solition and are widely applied in the current optical communication systems (e.g., CRZ, DPSK modulation, high capacity DWDM....). It seems the author is not in touch with the industry for many years and is repeating the older and dead topics.
Moreover the software contained in the CD-ROM is completely useless.

This is a horrible book that presents a lot of scattered topics but fails to bound them together. It has a lot of ultra long math formulas on every pages with very brief explainations. The little explaination is done by refering to other abstract formulas which are on other pages!

It is totally unreadable and may be it is intended to be a reference book only.