Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is, perhaps, the most "intuitive" textbook in communications engineering in recent memory. While the emphasis of this text is on theory, Gallager does a fantastic job in connecting the mathematics to engineering. While the target audience of the text is Graduate students, anyone with a decent background in real analysis or linear algebra will be able to get a lot of mileage out of Gallager's approach, which is to start with "toy models", i.e. simple models, and then modify these models accordingly for different environments (i.e. Wireless).
While the book surveys various aspects of communications engineering, such as information theory and wireless communications, the true "meat" of the book lies in its presentation of the most fundamental aspects of communications theory. Notably, this book, like Wozencraft's and Jacob's Principles of Communication Engineering, presents the signal space approach (using L2 orthonormal expansions to represent waveforms and noise) to a in a very clear manner. Most communications engineering books these days seem to (incorrectly) teach students (including myself as an undergraduate) to reason about problems in communications theory primarily in terms of cosines and sines. This text, however makes it clear that most problems in communications theory can be explained in terms of the signal space viewpoint.
There probably isn't a single word, phrase, or mathematical expression that is not needed in this text. As another reviewer mentioned, readers have the benefit of being able to watch Gallager's online lectures, which complement this text, via MIT Open Courseware. Even if you have not studied communications engineering in great depth, I encourage you to watch the lectures to witness Gallager's clear style of articulating engineering principles.
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The renowned communications theorist Robert Gallager brings his lucid writing style to the study of the fundamental system aspects of digital communication for a one-semester course for graduate students. With the clarity and insight that have characterized his teaching and earlier textbooks, he develops a simple framework and then combines this with careful proofs to help the reader understand modern systems and simplified models in an intuitive yet precise way. A strong narrative and links between theory and practice reinforce this concise, practical presentation. The book begins with data compression for arbitrary sources. Gallager then describes how to modulate the resulting binary data for transmission over wires, cables, optical fibers, and wireless channels. Analysis and intuitive interpretations are developed for channel noise models, followed by coverage of the principles of detection, coding, and decoding. The various concepts covered are brought together in a description of wireless communication, using CDMA as a case study.
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