Customer Reviews

Probability, Random Variables, and Random Signal Principles

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

 

 

This book is one of the best undergradute textbooks for EE students, especially students having focus on physical-layer communication engineering. The highlight of this book is the enormous amount of well-written problems at the end of each chapter. These problems really help students fully understand abstract definitions and theorems which otherwise will not be easily cracked.

This book, however, has the following drawbacks:
1. The author should have emphasized in the first chapter the importance of real analysis and measure theory in order to motivate the students planning graduate research to study and prepare for the math courses during their undergraduate study.
2. No section for complex Gaussian random variable and vector, which are very important in digital communications.
3. No limit theorems except CLT.
4. No handling of convergence of a random sequence.

Even with above drawbacks, this book is still the classic. I recommend ambitious students to read a little bit advanced books along with this book to better understand the subject.

The book offers no rigor in any sense and the author seems to have simply copied a large number of formulas from a real probability book. Explanations are sparse and incoherent with vague references to "important applications" with no sense of the abstract concept and virtually no insight into any of the information presented; as another reviewer wrote it is quite dry, I can't see Ben Stein narrating it, but I can picture the author sitting at his keyboard haphazardly plunking in text from other 'sources' all the while wondering what it means.

Skip this and get something with more substance, Peebles offers nothing more than you could find on wikipedia, perhaps less.

This book though looks simple and pretends to present concepts in a lucid manner, does not match international standards. Very few examples are present with less/no illustrations. I struggled with this book for almost 2 years to understand the concepts as this book was the only popular book in my UG college and was readily available in our library. It has ideally no practical examples which can easily discourage reader. After reading contemporary books from Prof Roy Yates and Prof Leon-Garcia, I could do little favor for this book by giving 1 star.

However, one who is already thorough with concepts can use this book for revision. There is a huge element of risk involved in starting with this book to learn probability concepts.

This book does not have enough examples in the text. I tend to learn better by example and this book is not for people like myself. Also, there are no solutions to any of the homework problems in the back of the book. So you can't check your answers to see if you are doing the problems right.

The quality of the book in terms of condition is very good and it arrived on time, but in terms of material, it fails miserably. The material is not presented well and has very few examples to show how to solve problems. One other problem is that some of the mathematical formulas are written in a circular fashion which tells you nothing of importance. Unless you need to buy this book to use as a class text book, spend your money elsewhere.

Unfortunately I had to get the book in order to follow with the rest of the class.
This book isn't terrible but with out instructor's well contribution this will get you confused and lost on many places.

This book is simply "okay." It is formatted nicely and easy to look at. The first few chapters on the review of statistics is generally nice (and even led me to question the negative reviews from others until I progressed further).

Mid-way through Chapter 6, just about when stationarity is introduced, the text becomes useless to anyone who is not familiar with the subject matter. Intuition is none-existent in the topics presented - to the extent that I was confused by the presentation of subjects that I was already strong with.

I am told Gardner's book is an excellent book with deep intuition; I have ordered it and will read it with the possibility of returning to peebles after I have a much better idea of what's going on.

I am a novice. I've been reading some other books of probability before, and I've found that this one is much clearer than the others.

This book does a very poor job of explaining principles and concepts involved in this subject after chapter number one. This book has examples that are poorly explained and infrequent. The examples seem to consist of one the formulae two the answer with no explanation of the reasoning or the how of the intermediate steps required to obtain the solution. Also example problems are full of subitutions without explanation of these "clever tricks" subistutions. Additionally this work has no given answers to the given problems at the back of the chapters. As all students know trying to solve problems this is essential to check ones work for understanding of the course material and problem questions.
For example I always do some problems at the back chapter and check to see if I have arrived at correct answers. If I do I can assume I have a pretty good understanding of the material. This seems to always work for me.
In summary this books lack of detailed explained examples,lack of details on those examples and lack of answers in the back of the book makes me wonder if the author expects the students to use the ouji board to understand his example problems, the Pshchic friends hotline for the written material and random guess process for the problems at the back of the chapters.