Probability and Random Processes with Applications to Signal Processing (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: KooKo
Review: I am a grad student who has to read this book every week to do the homework :P. Personally I do not reccommend the book for anyone who doesn't have strong random process background. For average student like me, I found myself read it more than 10 times in some of the topics to get the idea of the section (in order to finish end of chapter's questions). Also, I feel like there are some missing link that the author left out (may be because author assume that you know the background quite well) and that sometimes make the flow of the explanation not smooth.(for me)

Rating:
Summary: mediocre Prob and Random Processes textbook
Review: I found Probability and Random Processes a difficult subject and it was compounded by the instructor's selection of the stark and woods textbook. While it has some interesting problem sets and the tone of the text is very engaging, Probability and Random Processes, 3rd ed. has several problems. First of all, the book has several typos, including some in derivations which can cause a "what the...?" moment. Second, many sections in the introductory material gloss over derivations, skip steps, or leave proofs of theorems as the classic "exercize for the reader." (!) The biggest problem the text has is that it doesn't adequately explain the intuition for problem solving. For an engineer coming from industry and starting grad school after an extended period away from college, the net result is that the book is not self-contained. I had to buy the Papoulis book and the Schaum's outline to keep my head above water. When the semester was over I ditched the Stark and Woods and kept the Papoulis book.

Rating:
Summary: Beware: Scattered and full of holes
Review: I had the misfortune to take an EE grad course in Random Processes using this text (3rd edition.) Let me start with the single good point about the book before thrashing its shortcomings. The book does a good job of covering basic probability theory, which is handy if you've never dealt with set theory, algebras, etc. From that point on, it goes downhill quickly. The introduction to random variables and subsequent random process treatment jumps all over the place, skipping many integral pieces and steps along the way. There is no attempt to build a body of knowledge and then instruct the reader in methodology to solve typical problem sets. To compound this, the book is replete with typographical errors in formulas, proofs, and general verbiage. The problem sets at the end of each chapter are sometimes challenging, but mostly just obtuse and vaguely worded exercises that do not follow any progressive order in the chapter just covered. Some of the problem sets actually require knowledge from subsequent chapters to solve, which makes doing the problems more an exercise in leafing forward and backward in the book rather than a meaningful intuition building and problem solving exercise. I will admit that the Papoulis book is a little dense, but it doesn't skip steps or gloss over any 'obvious' steps in the proofs or example problems. It seems that the Schaum's guide and Papoulis books at least follow a progressive process of building knowledge while this book has roughly the same knowledge, but scattered across many chapters (when it logically should all be treated contiguously.) If you happen to take a class using this book, be forewarned that you really will need several other references (Schaum's guide for certain, Papoulis is dense but complete, that's all I have) to piece together the puzzle on this otherwise very interesting and relevant subject.

Rating:
Summary: Not very Good!
Review: I had to use this book for a graduate course on Random Processing. The explanations are not very clear. I constantly had to refer to Papoulis's book in order to clarify topics. Some subjects are broken into several parts and each is discussed in a different chapter. this made it very annoying because I to go back and forth between many chapter to get the idea. Overall, i don't recommend it to someone who wants to learn random processes.

Rating:
Summary: Not very Good!
Review: The new type font makes the book worth the price alone, compared to previous editions. There are some minor typos, which is discouraging, since it is a new edition. Great for use in a first year grad course along with Leon-Garcia text from undergrad probability/Random variables.

I recommend it.