telecommunications

Many of the bad marks for this book come from people using it to learn digital communications for the first time. However, I think its pretty good as a review text: it clearly and concisely covers the important concepts. It also manages to give a better feel of the theory from an application point of view, though their treatment of magnetic recording does not accurately describe important implementation details.

My only knock on the book is that it would be well served by having more examples.

Still, a better book as an overview is "Digital Communications" by Bernard Sklar.

I had this book for my intoductory communication class. Unfortunately this book is not for newbies as claimed by the authors or publishers. If you have previous experience with this subject, then this book may be helpful because it covers a lot of stuff. However if you are not very familiar with this subject, you will find this book unreadable and in some cases mathmatically incomplete. Also in several instances the book makes easy concepts complicated. One of the examples in the textbook which was solved by our instructor using about 5 steps was solved in the book with more than 15 steps. End of chapter problems are insane. I just wonder how the author expects us to do those by giving just a few trivial examples.
Bottomline is that if you have to buy this book because it is required by your instructor, then your instructor better be good and know shortcuts. If you are planning to buy this book for self study then I wouldn't recommend it. Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems by B.P. Lathi is a better choice as that book is easier to understand and more complete mathematically.

I usually understand concepts more from the book than from the class and a readable book is what prepares me for the exam. I regret to say that this book is not very readable for beginners. The book covers a lot of stuffs but not in great detail. Further the end of chapter problems CAN NOT be solved by reading the examples alone. So unless you have an excellent teacher teaching this class, or you have the basics for this course, stay away from this book.