Communication Systems

Rating:
Summary: Horrible book for communication, great way to fall in sleep
Review: I currently use this text in an introductory course to communication systems. I find the text very porrly written with large numbers of errors. The errors are sometimes easy to spot and sometimes rather difficult to find. My professor many times stumbles over the errors. Sometimes it's a battle to understand the examples worked out in the text. A good example of the extent of the errors can be found on page 109 where the authors claim that 35 + 55 - 199.1 + 20 equals -144.1. I thought that such addition was taught in 1st and 2nd grade. A second example is much harder to find such as the + sign instead of a - sign in example 3.5-1 on page 122. I could go on and on with several more examples of egregious errors, but there's not enough room to fit them all. I have written letters to my dean, the editors, and the publisher stating that this book is riddled with many many errors and should be immediately pulled from course materials and publications. If anyone writes a positive review of this book they are either lying, incompetent themselves or had a very good professor who could help them past the errors in the book or avoided using the text as much as possible. If you have a professor who is using this book I recommend you either drop the course or see if the professor is willing to change the text material.

Rating:
Summary: Very poorly written text.
Review: I currently use this text in an introductory course to communication systems. I find the text very porrly written with large numbers of errors. The errors are sometimes easy to spot and sometimes rather difficult to find. My professor many times stumbles over the errors. Sometimes it's a battle to understand the examples worked out in the text. A good example of the extent of the errors can be found on page 109 where the authors claim that 35 + 55 - 199.1 + 20 equals -144.1. I thought that such addition was taught in 1st and 2nd grade. A second example is much harder to find such as the + sign instead of a - sign in example 3.5-1 on page 122. I could go on and on with several more examples of egregious errors, but there's not enough room to fit them all. I have written letters to my dean, the editors, and the publisher stating that this book is riddled with many many errors and should be immediately pulled from course materials and publications. If anyone writes a positive review of this book they are either lying, incompetent themselves or had a very good professor who could help them past the errors in the book or avoided using the text as much as possible. If you have a professor who is using this book I recommend you either drop the course or see if the professor is willing to change the text material.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible book for communication, great way to fall in sleep
Review: I had the (bad) luck of having Dr. Roberts as my professor for Communication Systems.Frankly, his book sucks more than his teaching style. This book is very hard to follow, and its the most boring book ever.Not many useful examples, no detailed explanation of how to solve problems, this book is useless.

Rating:
Summary: I want to have a recap of this book
Review: I have read this book once i understood most of things, i need to put them together one more time. Please help me out.

Rating:
Summary: Very good introduction to the topic for EE students
Review: I used an earlier edition of this text in the Communications Systems course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (where Prof. Carlson was, at that time, the head of the Electrical Engineering Department) and found it to be a very good book. The explanations were concise and easy-to-understand. The book explains the underlying concepts well. The mathematical tools needed for the understanding of the concepts are introduced at the appropriate times.

This book is used in the EE curricula at RPI and at Stanford University (in the EE 279 Introduction to Communication Systems course) and at other schools.

For an EE student at the undergraduate level, this is an excellent introduction to communication systems and should help you understand quite a variety of topics dealing with both analog and digital communications.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but needlessly difficult
Review: The strong points of this book are its mathematical rigor and its ability to convey the intuition behind the math. Unfortunately, there are several weak points. First, there are a surprising number of typos in the book for a fourth edition, even in text that is carried over from the third edition. Second, it is very difficult to read because the authors define a variable once, then use it repeatedly without redefinition, even if the variable is unused for many pages. If you have a photographic memory, this is ok. If not, you spend needless time searching the text for the definition. Finally, the problems at the end of each chapter are often ambiguous. This is life in the real world, but is needlessly frustrating in an academic setting.

If you have the time to dig through this tome, it is worth the effort. But given the clarity with which it explains its topics, such effort is required primarily due to deficiencies in the books style and not the difficulty of the subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Boring Book Ever!
Review: We used it in Turku, AMK, Sepänkatu! It's a boring book to use! It's too big and heavy! The things are demostrated in a very difficult way! I hate it! Don't buy it!

Rating:
Summary: The Most Boring Book Ever!
Review: We used it in Turku, AMK, Sepänkatu! It's a boring book to use! It's too big and heavy! The things are demostrated in a very difficult way! I hate it! Don't buy it!