Customer Reviews

Signals and Systems: Continuous and Discrete

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Text is somewhat difficult to read compared to similar titles. Author frequently only solves problems with a "twist" then only offers a limited number of problems at the end of the chapter.

hard to follow, not enough relevant example

I was really surprised by some of the negative comments written on this book, and that is why I decided to write this comment. This book was the one assigned to the undergraduate course I took entitled Signals and Systems. In fact, this book made me like communications and signal processing, and I believe that it motivated me a lot (beside the other book by Ziemer & Tranter entitled Principles of Communication Systems: Modulation, Noise, Systems, 4th edition) to go for the graduate studies in communications and signal processing. What I liked about the two books was that they assume NO prior knowledge of the topics covered and they move on smoothly from one subject to another so that the student will have a better understanding of the "big picture" as he/she moves on. Well, I guess that the other "negative" comments about this book were written by students who expected to understand the topics covered in this book from one skim read. Let me say that that is NOT the case here. In order to understand the topics covered very well, you should read them more than once and try to solve as many problems as possible. But trust me on this: once you do so, you will grasp the material very well and will have a "feel" of what is going on.

If I was a tree, I would be upset that some of my fellow trees made the ultimate sacrifice to become the paper that is used in this piece of trash someone pawned off as a textbook for a signals and systems course. I really expected a lot more from authors coming from the University of Colorado and VA Tech. This book completely tarnishes the names of those fine schools. The book is poorly organized, poorly written and the proofs for most of the equations are given as problems at the end of the chapter. Most of the examples that are given are special cases and can not be used for things that are more common in real life. Footnotes often take up more than half a page making the book extremely hard to read and comprehend. The vocabulary is such that the authors explain the words used in the text over and over. This book is one notch below useless. If I could I would rate it minus two stars. In an effort to save my grade for the course using this book I went ahead and purchased two other books in the hope to supplement this one. At the end of this semester I am burning this book to prevent it from spreading the pain and frustration it has caused me onto other people. If you have a choice, I highly recommend that you do not buy this book.

After taking two classes that used this text at GMU in Fairfax, VA. My suggestion is that you find another book that provides better examples and explanations of the material and not waste your time trying to understand the terse explanations and incomplete examples provided in this text.

I took two undergraduate courses based on the first edition of this book during my Junior year in the BSEE curriculum. It is without a doubt a mathematically oriented book as any signals & systems textbook should be. The tie into real world problems though present were in fact lacking in the first edition in my opinion and left to follow-on courses in communications or image processing.

That said this book does what it is supposed to do: Introduce the student to the mathematical modeling and characterization of signals and systems. It's thorough treatment of the Fourier, LaPlace transformation, including the derivation of many transform pairs, forces the student to understand the mathematical basis of the unique time-frequency domain properties of numerous system input and response functions. The second semester continues that trend with the z-transform, discrete Fourier transform and the FFT.

During graduate work several years later, I called upon the knowledge acquired during my undergraduate work, and specifically this book, to literally cruise ahead of my classmates on numerous tests and courses. On several occasions, I literally looked around the room during tests to witness fellow graduate classmates stumped. Ziemer, Tranter & Fannin, did a good job creating this book and with Bobby Betton's instruction (RIP), they helped many students understand and excel in mathematically challenging courses. 20+ years into my career, I find myself referring to this book again for its relevance to my work.

This is one of those books that a lot of people hate. Most people that hate it, from what I've seen, also hated the course or the topic.

If you really want to understand signals and systems, and by this I don't mean using cookie-cutter recipes, buy this book.

This book skips nothing. Everything is proven using math. The proofs and tables are some of the few tidbits from my undergraduate career that I still find myself looking back on. This book never leaves my desk.

This book doesn't contain flowery, colorful diagrams. There aren't any clip-art chapter title pages. There aren't TI-89 programs or java examples, and there isn't a CD included. (Mine is the 3rd edition, so maybe this has changed). So if you wanted a picturebook, look elsewhere.

In my opinion, this is the best introductory text for a Signals and Systems course, and a very useful book for any engineer looking to learn DSP or digital communications. Even all-analog guys will get a lot of milage out of the concepts.

If you find this text frustrating, clear your mind, and get a pad of paper, a pencil, and this textbook, and just start working the examples and proofs, beginning with where you feel lost. If you're willing to put in the time (it may be several hours), it'll be worth it in the end. This book imparts a lot of intuition about signals and is well worth the sweat.

This book is good resource for this class as it has many examples and helpful Matlab coded examples. However for someone that is taking this course with no previous experience in to signals and/or system with average calculus skills, it will be very challenging. I would suggest a book that subscribes to a more basic level.

I found this book lacking in enough detail to get through even the simplest problems. Details published in footnotes were as important as the text. I would not recommend this book as a teaching aid without the aid of additional text.

Unlike texts that read like they have been compiled by cutting and pasting, this one reads like the authors are directly talking to you.

Some things I like about this text:

* It does not omit the hard stuff, like the inversion integral for laplace transforms so you don't have to rely only on transform tables.

* It includes topics not often found in introductory signals and systems texts like the chirp-z transform.

* It has several worked examples for each section and shows how to perform the calculations both by hand and using matlab.

* The end-of-chapter problems are doable.

* The approach taken in the text is a general systems approach and not a narrow circuits approach.

While everyone's entitled to their opinion many of the negative reviews appeared to be critical without substance.