Digital Communications

Product Description

Revised to reflect all the current trends in the digital communications field, this all-inclusive guide delivers an outstanding introduction to the analysis and design of digital communication systems. Includes expert coverage of new topics: Turbocodes, Turboequalization, Antenna Arrays, Digital Cellular Systems, and Iterative Detection. Convenient, sequential organization begins with a look at the historyo and classification of channel models and builds from there.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #278642 in Books
* Published on: 2000-08-15
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 1024 pages

Customer Reviews

The Reference for researchers in telecommunication5
This book is a reference for researchers in telecommunication. With more than 30 pages of references, this book is an excellent review of the principal publications in telecommunication.

This is not a book for students !

A lot of formulas, very little insight2
The author has, maybe, good knowledge of the material, but little contact with reality. A lot of formulas, piled up, offer practically no insight. Contrast this with the book of Sklar, "Digital Communciations". Proakis offers a fake "advanced" mathematical level, that might impress an ignorant beginning graduate student, but removes any chance of understanding the material because of the plethora of useless pictures, formulas and words.
The material of the book could have been presented in a quarter of the space. It is hard to imagine a poorer writing style.

worst textbook ever2
I took a graduate class at the University of Cincinnati and they used this book (it was round 2 for me as I had Communication Systems with his book that was co-authored by Salehi). Two classes + two Proakis books = brain hemorrhage. I will say that if you are mathematically strong doing well in these courses won't pose a problem. However, the amount of rereading needed to hammer in the concepts is overwhelming. It wouldn't have to be this way if he put in a lot of examples. Also, most of the problems are proofs or very complex and for that reason I noticed that neither of the professors that I had used problems from the book on exams. One exam was forced to become a take home as the results were so terrible and the other was a gram schmidt problem coupled with a small proof on bandpass signals. Some advice is in order. Follow these steps if you want to learn the material:

1.) Take and ace a Random Processes class. This will get you the background you need to blow through chapters 2 and 4 of Digital Communications by Proakis.

2.) Over break or during free time pick up the Communication Systems Engineering book and read through chapter 7 to hammer home chapter 5 of Digital Communications.

3.) Invest in a solution manual if you can find it. This way one can try ALL of the problems in the text and really learn the material.

As a final note, if you can master this course then there is absolutely no graduate class that will stand in your way. Any wireless or DSP class will seem like calc I after it.