Customer Reviews

Signals, Systems, and Transforms (4th Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

This is a very poor book. It is filled with errors, and the presentation is extremely incoherent (not clear at all, despite the editorial claims). Entire paragraphs of thought were left out. The order of the text is crazy. The pictures are not very good. The presentation is not qualitative. My classmates do not understand the material conceptually from the book, and we have one of the authors as our teacher. I wish I could say this book is going to get better in future editions, but it is fundamentally flawed. It would need to be completely rewritten by different authors.

STAY away from this text, even if your school requires it. You will NOT learn the material from this book. If you are a school official, PLEASE do not use this text for your school!

GET BOTH OF THESE instead. They are the best:

-- Linear Signals and Systems by B.P. Lathi
An EXCELLENT book about systems and signals that is incredibly qualitative, clear, and carefully written. The first 6 chapters about Systems are its strength. You will really learn the material well, not just theory, but real world. Its Fourier signal anaylsis chapters are a bit weaker.

-- Transforms in Signals and Systems by Peter Kraniauskas
An amazing book with the most incredible qualitative GRAPHICS. The entire subject of transform analysis is presented with pictures AND complete analysis. You can't possibly understand the transforms better with any other presentation. This is the book to use for Fourier transform analsys.

This book is evil. I mean evil in the Biblical sense. Think Dante's Inferno and the innermost circle of hell. Actually, being frozen in a lake or forced to eat excrement seem rather pleasant compared to the twisted, nonsensical passages in this book. Perhaps I would have liked the book better if it had been written in Farsi. I don't understand Farsi either, but at least then it would have had an excuse.

The book is poorly worded. Examples are not fully worked, and make critical assumptions between steps that are neither documented nor explained. The homework problems bare as much semblance to the text as I bare to Tommy Lee or a large piece of office furniture. Sections of the book are not in chronological order, meaning that critical information for understanding a section is often several more sections ahead.

If you have to buy this text, I strongly recommend purchasing the Shaums (sp?) Outlines on Fourier Transforms, which is concisely written and has several well documented examples. I encourage you to keep this book in the bathroom as an alternate source of material should you run out of toilet paper. At least then, you may get some use out of it.

...and save yourself the grief of trying to learn anything from this book. This is the required text in one of my EE courses and I haven't found a single redeeming quality in it yet.

The material is not presented in a very concise manner I typically spend a great deal of time filtering through the chapters to find the important details. Most of the time I have to go to a text from one of my other courses to find what I am looking for.

The examples are few and not helpful in working the exercises at the end of the chapters.

Any good text on circuit analysis which covers the Fourier and Laplace transforms and their applications would be more useful.

Signals & Systems is a very complex topic - it needs to be presented in a very clear and consise manner with plenty of examples and explanation. This text has none of those qualities. I supplemented this text with the Shaums's Outline for Signals & Systems; I still could barely follow the class. A much better text on the topic is "Signals and Systems" by Simon Haykin and Barry Van Veen. It accomplished in one edition what "Signals, Systems, and Transforms" has not accomplished in three.

This is a very poor book. It is filled with errors, and the presentation is extremely incoherent (not clear at all, despite the editorial claims). Entire paragraphs of thought were left out. The order of the text is crazy. The pictures are not very good. The presentation is not qualitative. My classmates do not understand the material conceptually from the book, and we have one of the authors as our teacher. I wish I could say this book is going to get better in future editions, but it is fundamentally flawed. It would need to be completely rewritten by different authors.

STAY away from this text, even if your school requires it. You will NOT learn the material from this book. If you are a school official, PLEASE do not use this text for your school!

GET BOTH OF THESE instead. They are the best:

-- Linear Signals and Systems by B.P. Lathi
An EXCELLENT book about systems and signals that is incredibly qualitative, clear, and carefully written. The first 6 chapters about Systems are its strength. You will really learn the material well, not just theory, but real world. Its Fourier signal anaylsis chapters are a bit weaker.

-- Transforms in Signals and Systems by Peter Kraniauskas
An amazing book with the most incredible qualitative GRAPHICS. The entire subject of transform analysis is presented with pictures AND complete analysis. You can't possibly understand the transforms better with any other presentation. This is the book to use for Fourier transform analysis.

I've had a class with the author of this book and found the book to be hard to follow, vague, and almost impossible to read. Unfortunately this might be the best book on this subject.

unless you have an awesome professor that teaches in detail your going to need additional books/resources to help you learn the subject. all the information in the book is vague, it goes into very little detail, and doesnt help you complete the problems at the end of the chapters

the only one who understood this book in my class was the professor, and we could barely understand him!
This is an incredibly dry and dull book, but the worst part is that the explanations to concepts are horendous... so if you like watsing time then this book is for you, although I do not know of many other books like this so if someone finds it please post it! else use this one as a paperweight!

Honestly this book is terrible. The chapters explanations are not broken up well, which makes finding information for solving problems very hard. I frequently found myself reading a chapter 2-3 times just to get a vague understanding of what they mean. And to top it off, the useful equations were often sandwiched between the steps of a derivation without any distinction.

Only buy this book if your class requires it, and then only use it for the required homework problems. Buy another book to learn from.

This book was a required text for a Signals and Systems course at my university's EE program. This book is terrible. The instructor only referred to it for two tables and maybe for half a dozen end of chapter problems for homework. Lectures did not follow the text, and how could they? As other reviewers have noted, the text assumes you already have a working knowledge of many of the concepts. Why else would they be presented in such an incoherent and haphazard manner?

If this is a required text for a college course, then you are stuck with it. Even the cheaper International Edition will not serve you well because the end of chapter problems are completely different. Graduate students with a working knowledge of signal processing may find some use of it. Otherwise I do not recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn the fundamental of DSP because they are simply skipped over here.

By the way, I typically save all my textbooks in case I need them in the field. I sold this one.