Rating: 
Summary: TELECOM Engineer...To complex!! NOT practical.
Review: My teacher at Georgia Tech said.."this is like the bible of digital communication"..and certainly it is like the bible, confusing and too complex. Theory wise, OK it serves well, but as a reference for practice..get Lee and Messerchmitt!!
Rating: 
Summary: very good reference
Review: The best reference book for a digital communication enginner or academician.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book.
Review: This book by Dr.Proakis is a bible for Digital Communications. I have studied this book in graduate degree program and also use it at work regularly. I find this book significantly more advanced, and mathematically complete compared to the Digital Communication textbook by Dr. Sklar. If you are involved in advance digital communication systems design or research, this book is a tremendous resource. Starting from the concepts of source coding, entropy, rate-distortion, through concepts of signal space, signal design for bandlimited channels, optimum receivers, channel capacity & coding, trellis coded modulation, channel equalization, spread spectrum and multi-user communication systems, fading channels etc., this book covers them all in superb conceptual and mathematical detail.This book is designed to be an advance (Graduate) level text/reference and therefore assumes that the reader is equipped with advance mathematics including probability, random variables and stochastic processes, and communication systems concepts based upon linear systems analysis.
Rating: 
Summary: Good coverage of materials, difficult to read.
Review: This book has high information density, makes it difficult for self-study but has good engineering approach to materials, once get used to reading it you will also be familiar with this kind of approach in many papers about digital communications. Good coverage of materials.
Rating:
Summary: Van Trees' "Detection, Estimation and Modulation Theory"
Review: This book is an excellent reference a gives a deep idea of many aspects of digital communication. At the beginning (chapter 1) the statistical theory is discussed, then the digitally modulated signals and their power and spectral characteristics are analyzed. Then it goes deeper in advanced matters. I found this book excellent, even if it can be tough to read for people without a good math background or previous knowledge in the field. Anyway if you are interest in looking for particular reference it is really excellent and gives also a brief about where to go for further info at the end of each chapter. Definitely not for undergraduate students looking for a basic idea, but very good for a deeper mathematical approach. It think everyone who works in this field should have a copy.
Rating:
Summary: very good reference book
Review: This book is an excellent reference a gives a deep idea of many aspects of digital communication. At the beginning (chapter 1) the statistical theory is discussed, then the digitally modulated signals and their power and spectral characteristics are analyzed. Then it goes deeper in advanced matters. I found this book excellent, even if it can be tough to read for people without a good math background or previous knowledge in the field. Anyway if you are interest in looking for particular reference it is really excellent and gives also a brief about where to go for further info at the end of each chapter. Definitely not for undergraduate students looking for a basic idea, but very good for a deeper mathematical approach. It think everyone who works in this field should have a copy.
Rating:
Summary: good book only if you already know the subject
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very Solid on the Fundamentals of Communication Theory
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Very Solid on the Fundamentals of Communication Theory
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Great for I year grad students
Review: Truly a comprehensive book.I have gone through Haykin and Sklar.Sklar is elementary.Haykin is not exhaustive.Proakis is a fine balance between the number of topics covered and the length of treatment of each subject.I am glad that he assumes a certain level of math as prerequisite.I loved the sections on the optimum receivers.Problems are nice and provide good practice of the theory learnt. However if you really want to understand the foundations of "Digital Communication" I recommend the book by Viterbi and Omura - McGrawhill 1979.No modern book can match the treatment in this book.It is a real master piece for years to come. All in all Proakis does a great job given the pressures to include lots of newer topics.
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