Customer Reviews

Signals and Systems (Prentice-Hall signal processing series)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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.

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!

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).

I am an Aerospace graduate student reading this book on my own time and pace (not taking the undergrad Electrical Engineering class that teaches/uses this book). I found out about this book because my friend (an EE student) was in that class and I asked him if I could look through it. After looking through it I decided to buy it, and I'm glad I did.

This is a VERY GOOD no-nonsense book. A brief personal background, I've read Control Systems Engineering by Norman S. Nise (Very good book!), and am now reading this book. I would say that this book is really not something you want to dive into without any prior background. Start with a good controls book (Nise, Ogata, etc) and learn the basics. THEN read this book to get the finer details.

Also, make sure you have the MATH background for this book. A lot of this book is dedicated to the fourier series, laplace xfrm, and z xfrm. If you have not had a formal class is fourier series, you might find this difficult to grasp. I would STRONGLY recommend you have a background of: SISO controls, ODEs, and PDEs.

If you have already taken these pre-reqs, this book is a great 'aha!' moment that nicely combines the concepts from all these areas and really gives you nice insights into how they are all related.

As for the problems, I'm not doing them. I'm reading this book for the material, not for a grade. I don't doubt the objections made that the problems are SIGNIFICANTLY harder than the examples. BUT, life is tough. I would recommend you look through my PDE book (Partial Differential Equations - Strauss) to see the BIG JUMP in the hw from the VERY skimpy examples. There are lots of books like this. They are made to be hard for a reason, you have to use your brain to think creatively. Dont expect every book to hold your hand through problem solving!

I would ignore the people who rate this book a 1 just because they cant solve the homework problems. The writing is VERY clear and to the point. Please note, this is NOT a book you want to rush through when reading. If you take your time you will find that its actually VERY insightful.

Given the fast pace of a normal semester, you might find this book to be very dense. In other words, you will have to absorb a TON of material in a short amount of time. So I can see this being a tough class to take. Reading it at your own pace, this book is pure bliss!

As an undergrad electrical engineering student, this book was not exactly helpful. It gives extreme detailed literature on the concepts of fundamentals, but as a student trying to learn and solve LTI and convolution, it becomes unneccesarily wordy. Let's just say with this book, it's like solving a math problem with words instead of numbers. The professors might like this book because it forces students to look at the concepts instead of looking at examples to figure out the problem, but most students might be discouraged by the lengthy and dry reading (I'm not talking about a page here or there, at least 10 pages before you get to the actual problem). Also, the book does not divide it's section thoroughly, so if one wants to figure how to do something, they'll have to scan through the entire book with little or no diagrams. You practically have to scan through the whole literature to find something similar thinking that this will answer your question just to find that it may not be the one you're looking for. Simply put, extremely time consuming to learn one little concept. For me, at least, you stand a much better chance staying awake in lecture than to try to figure it out at home.

This is one of the finest text books I have read. It is a bit difficult but that is just the nature of the subject. If you struggle with the book, get the one by Lathi to help you bridge the gap.

The book by Lathi explains some background knowledge that you are supposed to have in more details than Oppenheim. For instance, it explains the difference between zero state response and zero input response in a great detail. But Oppenheim has a few better chapters on somewhat more advanced topics, for instance on sampling. So, get both if you can. I use both book often when learning this subject.

The topics covered in signals and system are so critical and interesting. I wish I had taken such a course before. I would recommend that all engineering students take this course. This course is somewhat difficult among undergrad level courses. But there are excellent resources to help you. The two books mentioned are excellent. UC Berkely offers a free video course on this. MIT has free course material on its web site also. The one by UC Berkely is quite easy, and the one by MIT is more challenging. Do the homework offered by MIT, and they are interesting and rewarding. The one by MIT follows Oppenheim's book precisely, another benefit for self-learners.

Two years after I used this book to learn the subject, I am now doing some signal processing. I went back to this book for some information. I now appreciate more about this book. It is very clear. It may be wordy for experienced people. But you could always skip certain sections. But if a book misses some details you need, it is much worse. I only wish the author could add a chapter on DFT. I had to go to another book for DFT.

I am a chinese undergraduate student in electronics engneering,
instand of giving out many hard to understand mathematical equations.it give you very basic understanding of signals & systems.it focused on why we should use this method,why we should think this way...instead of just teach you how to solve the n order differential equations,how to used complex and don't -know-why way to solve mathematical problems.
If you guys are lucky enough to gain the chinese text book we are using now on signals and systems.You will find it a piece of mathematics junk,in compare with this one.

It is probably the best book on the subject which I have had. It was the reference for my undergraduate signals and systems course. It is both good as a text book and a reference. Very well written! explains the concepts very clearly and has a lot of good examples and end of chapter problems.

This book is required reading for Purdue University's EE301 class. The author assumes that we have already taken multipal signals and systems classes and that we already know how to do many of the "tricks" he knows. However, the majority of the time, he fails to mention which trick he is using, or clearly show how to work the problem in an orderly fashion.

This text is a little murky. There are not a lot of examples demonstrating all of the different cases. The theory is explained briefly followed by lots of problems that you have to figure out how to work out on your own. Overall it is hard to understand unless you have a detailed knowledge of the signals to begin with.