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Summary: Bible for Communication Engineers
Review: A must read for communication engineers. Also a point to be noted that this book may not be suitable for beginners.
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Summary: Van Trees' "Detection, Estimation and Modulation Theory"
Review: As the previous reviewer mentioned, this book will be brought into its full use when combining with Van Tree's book. Now, it's the chance for you to get this hard to find, out-of-print classic.
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Summary: Peking University Take It as a Textbook.
Review: At the E.E. department of PKU, our profecessor take it as our textbook. Well, it is not too bad with somebody guiding you.
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Summary: Dry as Hell
Review: I agree with the other reviewers, and just wanted to recommend books that read much better. That is to say, books with some soul, that are kickin' Gitlin, Hayes, and Weinstein - Many typos, but definitely well written Lee and Messerschmitt - a nice read, too. Proakis will make a good reference.. in Hell!!!!
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Summary: Dry as Hell
Review: I agree with the other reviewers, and just wanted to recommend books that read much better. That is to say, books with some soul, that are kickin' Gitlin, Hayes, and Weinstein - Many typos, but definitely well written Lee and Messerschmitt - a nice read, too. Proakis will make a good reference.. in Hell!!!!
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Summary: Good overview; not for newbies
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer. Without the maths, digital signal analysis is simply impossible. One of the reviewers complained about the proof of the Nyquist theorem, based on the fourier transform. I looked it up; the proof is explicit and clear. Of course, readers who are unfamiliar with fourier transforms may find it difficult to follow the proof - they should first learn some elementary maths before reading this book. I'm glad that Proakis does not treat all the kindergarten stuff in full detail. After reading what this book has to say about equalization, error control, modulation, etc., the road to the professional literature is open.
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Summary: Good coverage but poor organization ...
Review: I both love and hate this book at the same time! Its great for its wide coverage and unified presentation of material but the organization is rather poor indeed. There is little motivation and the material is presented as a matter of fact collection of topics. The presentation also seems to be out of sequence at times. Other gripes: The errata is quite large and still not complete. Upon closer inspection, I found that several of the problems require assumptions that are not clearly described in the problem statement. This leads to a frustrating experience at times. I can think of ways in which the material could be re-organized to make the "flow" much better. Doing this and adding little motivation and connecting material would make this a truly great book. I don't think that much additional effort is required for the re-organization - too bad this hasn't happened in the first 4 editions. A major plus of the book remains - nothing else comes close in coverage. So it is still a pretty decent book if you can get the intuition and organization from elsewhere.
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Summary: Difficult to read and few examples
Review: I found this book tries to cover a lot of topics. So it becomes too brief and too few examples that I don't really learn much.
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Summary: He knows no more than formulas.
Review: I was told by one of my friends that this book has been reviewed in this site and obtained five-star comments. Having used this book as a text book for a full term, I really enjoyed nothing from the book, except for, maybe, its complete coverage on various topics and the depth it touches on (,which is the reason I still give it a three-star evaluation). The author seemingly knows nothing about the essence of the concepts he tries to develope in his book ( although this in fact should not be true given the fact that he is such a famous person in the area, his writing makes him to look so). He extensively uses complicated mathematics to develope the ideas, without any instructive interpretation of those formulas. Mathematical derivation is certainly necessary in such kind of books, but a conceptual insight into the formulas is indeed more important than the math itself. If it were Ronald Bracewell who wrote the book, it would contain 10 times more insights into the concepts and 10 times less mathematics to confuse readers. Usually for a book written in such a style, one would think it should be mathematically rigorous (as a trade-off of being boring). However , in this book even the rigorousness is not fulfilled. There are loosey-goosey derivations everwhere. Furhtermore, erroneous illustrations can be found throughout the book (some are even as the title of a section). This wouldn't be a surprise to people who are familiar with his writing style: in one of his other book on DSP, things are even worse. To make my comments more concrete, I will just mention a few such examples. When he derives the power spectral density for a digitally modulated signal, there are quite a lot confusion he made in terms of the linkage of the psd of a digital signal and that of an analog signal, and even the autocorrelation function was oddly formed without any explanation. When he expains the Nyquist criterion for zero ISI, the Fourier theroy was poorly developed, I would assume Bracewell will just use a few figures, without any math, to do a much better job. In discussing the channel capacity, a erroneous statement is made on the title of a section, saying "achieving the channel capacity with orthorgonal signals", where he messes up the concepts between channel capacity and the Shannon limit (Eb/N0) for an arbitary small transmission error. So in general, I do not give too much credit to the author, and strongly object using this book as a text book. Nevertheless, you can use it as a reference (since it is rather compelete) to get some rough understanding on various topics, but, keep in mind, do not trust it too much.
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Summary: Is this a textbook or a reference manual?
Review: 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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