Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is this a textbook or a reference manual?, December 19, 1999
By A Customer
Many of the reviewers criticized the book, largely because of it being difficult to read. However, the real question a potential reader should ask him/herself is whether the book is intended as a reference manual or as a textbook for learning new material. As a textbook, the pace is too fast, there are few examples, and the level is too complicated for the novice reader. However, as a reference manual, for the practicing engineer or researcher, this book encompasses a vast span of material and is extremely useful. The potential buyer must determine whether the book is intended as a textbook or reference manual. As a reference manual the book deserves the full five stars, but as a textbook, two stars are more than enough.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
good book only if you already know the subject, March 22, 2000
this is a great reference if you already know digital communication, but definitely not something that you read cover to cover. i hated this book when i was first forced to study from it, but on a second glance and a few years of research in communication theory, i like it quite a lot. definitely good for refreshing your memory or learning small things, but not for learning communication theory. you're much better off with the Proakis/Salehi "Communication System Engineering" book.
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38 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Solid on the Fundamentals of Communication Theory, October 12, 2001
This is an excellent graduate level treatment of communication theory. This book is not about communication system engineering. Rather, it is about hard core communication theory. The book follows the topical organization established in three previous editions with minor modifications, mostly new added material on channel codes and transmit-diversity through the use of space-time codes. It has the usual first chapters on probability, random process theory, the sampling theorem, and bandpass processes before it launches into the heart of the subject which starts with optimum detection of signals in classical AWGN channels, estimation of signal parameters (viz. frequency, phase, symbol time). Interestingly, the estimation of signal amplitude is not covered even though it is a critical parameter for the demodulation of QAM signals. The book next takes a minor detour to introduce Shannon theory and channel coding for error control before returning to modulation-demodulation. The band-limited channel is taken up next. Signaling waveforms that have either zero or controlled (that means small) intersymbol interference (ISI) are covered, as is the reception of signals passed through band-limited channels by means of maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) and various equalization approaches. However the issue of tracking a time-varying channel and the required speed of adaptation for doppler spread channels, such as are encountered in UHF and microwave mobile communication systems, is not addressed. This book is about fundamentals. Higher dimensional signaling, under the guise of multi-channel and multi-carrier communication is nicely introduced, including the FFT multicarrier method used in xDSL systems. A chapter is devoted to introducing direct-sequence and frequency-hop spread-spectrum signaling and code division multiple access (CDMA). The next chapter covers the practical problems of communicating through channels that exhibit fading due to multipath. Spatial diversity receive processing and transmit diversity, aka space time coding are covered, but as mentioned above, fast fading channels are not covered. The last chapter is on multiuser communication but focuses only on channel access methods. The book would be better if the last chapter covered optimal demodulation of signals in channels that are impaired by fading plus AWGN plus cochannel interference (CCI), which would have lead naturally to a discussion of multiuser detection. The book then would have a pedagogic structure leading from the simple "known-signal-in-AWGN" channel through a hierarchy of increasingly difficult channel impairment models. Comparing the fourth edition to the first, which was published in 1983, it is gratifying to see how the book has evolved to stay up with current trends. Minor technical improvements are visible too, such as the elimination of the complementary error function erfc(.) in favor of the complementary cdf of the standard normal distribution Q(.) in error probability formulas. This book will serve today's students of communication theory well, as did its predecessors. Anyone who masters this book will be quite well prepared to move into any digital communication specialty field such as satellite communications, wireline communications, xDSL, mobile wireless communications, 3G, fixed broadband wireless, free-space optical and optical fiber.Stephen D. Stearns
TRW Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory
Sunnyvale, CA
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