Customer Reviews

Principles of Communication Engineering

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4 star:		(1)
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This is one of the best technical/theoretical books I have ever read. It sets the example for teaching the fundamentals of communication theory to a capable audience without diluting the content. Yes it is old, but OLD is GOLD in this case.

This book (combined with Van Trees' "Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, vol.1) is an excellent manuscript for a fundamental understanding of communication theory.

(1) Especially valuable is the chapter 4 (about optimum receiver principles), that makes this book a great buy. For the more enthusiastic student,

(2) Chapter 5 gives the derivation of the Shannon Capacity Theorem, a concept that makes one proud to understand.

(3) Chapters 2 & 3 provide very strong background on probability and random processes. You may have had these on your other courses, but this is a very nice treatment and referred by the later chapters.

(4) Chapter 6,7,8 are about implementation, channel models, and waveform communications, and they are obviously outdated, (e.g., Viterbi algorithm was not invented yet when this book was written) . However, if you feel the need to implement a Fano decoder, this is the best place to look, explanations by other books appear to be wrong!

RECOMMENDATION:
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This is one of the most valuable books for me in my personal library. Definitely buy it, you will not regret it.

This book sets the standard so high that other contemporary books on communication theory in general (examples: Proakis, Sklar) look like second rate, and rush job, copy and paste books on certain specialties such as space-time coding, MIMO (example: Paulraj et. al.) recyclable paper quality.

LONG LIVE: Wozencraft and Jacobs!

This 1965 textbook is arguably the most scholarly textbook ever written for communication engineers. Although the Proakis and Sklar (and also McKay) books are the standard textbooks for digital communications and estimation/detection theory nowadays; they don't even come close to this textbook. The Proakis textbook has gotten the unfortunate reputation as having the most comprehensive treatment regarding "hard-core" communication theory. However, the divergence between modern textbooks which are "practical" versus older textbooks which focus more on "theory" is very clear. Somewhere along the way, today's textbooks have truly lost much of the hard-core theory, and this book has it.

The Chapters are as follows: (1) Introduction (2) Probability Theory (3)Random Waveforms (4)Optimum Receiver Principles (5)Efficient Signaling for Message Sequences (6) Implementation of Coding Systems (7) Important Channel Models (8) Waveforms Communications and appendixes (A-D)

The chapter on probability is bar-none the most comprehensive I have ever seen in any digital communications book, and covers multidimensional pdf's and explains the significance of moments and other things you might only find in a book dedicated specifically to stochastic processes. The coverage of the topics on signal-spaces is fantastic, and the chapter on optimum receivers is also extremely thorough despite the age of this book. Wozencrafts treatment of "channel capacity" and the derivations which he provides are unlike anything in any other book, covering the sphere packing argument quite thoroughly (the only other author to ever get this comprehensive was Shannon himself, and Pierce in his 1960'is vintage book on information theory). His coverage of various important bounds is covered very well (i.e. Chernoff bound) such that even an undergraduate can understand it. Other chapters are equally well written. No, the book obviously is not as up to date as Sklar or Proakis and doesn't cover alot of the more "practical" aspects of modern communications.... but if you want a die-hard communication theory book... this is a classic must-have.

This book (combined with Van Trees' "Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, vol.1) is an excellent manuscript for a graduate level study of communication theory. Especially valuable is the chapter 4 (about optimum receiver principles), that makes this book a buy. For the more enthusiastic student, Chapter 5 gives the derivation of the Shannon Capacity Theorem, a concept that makes one proud to understand. Chapters 2 & 3 provide very strong background on probability and random processes. Chapter 6,7,8 are about implementation, channel models, and waveform communications, and they are outdated. All in all, this is one of the most valuable books for me in my personal library.

I used parts of this book in a digital communications course at UIUC. The book is written in a very lucid manner, atleast the chapters that I referred to - 3, 4 & 5. They provide a solid understanding to the subject material and it may seem mind boggling that even though the book was written way back in 1965 it is still a classic and is considered as one of the best references for optimum receiver principles. It makes for some smooth and sufficient reading (chaps. 3,4,5) when compared to other books such as that by Proakis etc. A must buy for any person in the Communication Area!

This book is like a rite of passage for communication engineers. If you're one of those and haven't read the book, then (1) don't tell anybody about it and (2) read the book immediately! Maybe we can conjecture that if someone knows communication then this person read Wozencraft and Jacobs. It must be said that the book is outdated, but the basics are there in a unequalled presentation.

This book is the best "text book" ever written for graduate-level digital communications, though some contents of the latter half part of this book is outdated.

The highlight of this book is its excellence in explaning "signal space concept" and "sufficiency of observables for optimum detection". Forget other textbooks and references you have. Read this book. I haven't yet found any other book that has better explanation on these topics.

What would be really nice is if a more modern edition could contain the solid theoretical treatment of optimum receivers, Shannon channel capacity, and coverage of signaling schemes, with more modern developments in modulation and coding, including the Viterbi algorithm.

Chapters 2 & 3 on Probability and Random Waveforms provide background for the rest of the text. However, when I used this book in a graduate communication theory course, we only covered chapters 4,5, and 6 as background in random processes was already assumed. However, we did rely somewhat on the treatment of Gaussian processes in Part I of Van Trees classic work.

Chapter 4 gives the student a solid mathematical understanding of optimum receiver design, that is still valid today. In Chapter 5, I particularly liked the treatment of Time, Bandwidth, and Dimensionality in Section 5.3. Section 5.5 provides outstanding treatment of the Channel Capacity Theorem, including a solid proof that aids in the proper understanding of the theorem.

Although Chapter 6 on coding has been overtaken by modern developments in this area it still serves as a high quality introduction to the basic concepts of coded systems. This material needs to be understood in order to better grasp more recent developments of the past few decades.

All in all, my recommendation would be for someone to write a textbook wich covers the basics of communication theory as well as this book does, and then to include content on more modern coding topics, spread spectrum communications, and fading channels.

As so many here have said, this is THE book from which to learn Communications theory. Not that you'll emerge as a pure theoretician. Quite the contrary, the priceless insights you'll gain into the underlying essence of the discipline will help catalyze your creativity in innovating advanced communications system solutions. (Of course, you'll need to continually supplement this with the wide variety of literature in the field, including the pertinent IEEE Transactions.)

As the previous reviewer mentioned, this book will be brought into its full use when combining with Van Tree's book. Now, it's the chance for you to get this hard to find, out-of-print classic -- Please visit amazon's z-shop.