Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Many other reviews not fully objective???, November 6, 2001
I have just used this text in teaching a second-year Signals and Systems course. Yes -- the students have struggled with the course, and several of them have grumbled about the book. However, none of the adverse comments I've received about the book either from my students or other reviewers here seem to be valid. The possible exception is the lack of more worked examples or at least answers to end of chapter problems.The book is an excellent basic introduction to the subject. It takes what can be a very difficult subject for students and provides a relatively clear path through the material. It doesn't assume very much mathematical background in the sense that there are plenty of very elementary problems in chapter one to remind you of the basics that you need for the rest of the book. Obviously if students have trouble with these problems they need to consider additional study to fill in some of the gaps in their knowledge on the mathematics side. The worked examples in the chapters are excellent, although sometimes you have to ask yourself what you are supposed to be learning from each example or end of chapter problem. The first 20 problems at the end of each chapter really cover the chapter material, and subsequent problems delve into the material in a little more depth or in relation to more real-world problems. If you understand the chapter you should have no great difficulty in doing the first 20 problems in each chapter, and the answers are provided to help you make sure you aren't missing the point. I found some of the other problems a little less clear, and certainly the students had difficulties here. I provided well over a hundred pages of written solutions for my students to try to overcome this deficiency. There is a solutions manual, but I don't recommend it all that highly. I found quite a lot of basic mistakes in the solutions manual. Several problems seemed to be done the "wrong way" compared to what I think the intention of the problem is. Also, some of the solutions in the solutions manual don't give enough guidance to students (at least not to the students I had in my course, and most likely not to many others judging by sorts of comments I've read in reviews here). On the other hand, I've probably made similar sorts of mistakes with the solutions I've provided, so I guess I can understand why the solutions manual has these deficiencies. A few of the end of chapter problems (very, very few) didn't seem to have much point. Some seemed to involve a lot of work, for not much instructive gain. However, the large majority of problems are excellent and highly instructive. As with all books there are possibly things which could be improved, but overall this book is excellent in terms of being a good basic introductory text for a Signals and Systems course. Such a course is something that many students are going to find difficult, but the book isn't to blame if that's the case.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable but sometimes unclear, March 20, 2007
This is one of my favorite books I've covered in my undergraduate degree.
I've noticed several previous reviewers have critisized this book based on clearly false assumptions. Clarification must be done for non-EEs:
This book, along others titled ' Signals and Systems' is intended as a preliminary to the 'systems' part of electrical engineering in general(namely Communications, Signal Processing, and Control). Hence it's not a book on standard DSP (the author has two other books that are specifically entitled Digital Signal Processing and Discrete time signal processing).
What's more, since this book was designed specifically as an introduction for sophomore and junior engineering students, one cannot expect this book to go into lebesgue2 space, inner-products, bounded-operators and the like. Certainly oppenheim didn't have functional analysts in mind when he wrote this book! The mathematically inclined reader should aim for 'Signal Analysis: Time, Frequency ,Scale, and Structure' by Allen and Mills.
As for the typical reader of this book, I think it is well written and the equations are very well motivated. The author repeats the difficult and essential concepts several times here and there, which is very useful for the new comers into the field, although I do agree with reveiwers that said the book needs some adjustments in terms of examples, which are sometimes trivial and sometimes confusing.
I believe the book needs to be updated by the author sometime. The book lacks computer problems and examples, which would be very helpfull for students to visualize what's going on.
hope this was useful!
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent introduction to the topic, June 25, 2003
Having had this book for 2 semesters in a Signals and Systems course, I can say that it has done its job in presenting an in-depth and clear introduction to the topic. It is well-written, structured, comprehensive and has lots of challenging (and not so) exercises and examples.A few comments on the latter: it seemed to me that the first 20 basic exercises at the end of each chapter were very basic, of the type "plug-in the formula from the table on the previous page", while the subsequent problems, especially the advanced ones, are way above the level of the former. Working out through those was meticulous, hard and very lengthy as compared to the basic stuff (the solutions provided by our instructor were of the order 1-2 typed pages per problem). Providing answers or at least general strategies would have been tremendously helpful. I am aware that there is a solutions manual, however the textbook itself is expensive enough. The information was presented clearly, but I liked our professor's introduction to convolution more that the book's coverage. The sampling chapter was, at least to me and some of my fellows, a bit confusing and we had to, again, rely more on class notes. Overall this is a good book, albeit very-very expensive (I was lucky enough to get a cheap Indian reprint).
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