Essential books for an engineering student – A book review

I will do a brief rundown on the books I have been using which I think are very good. This is sort of a book review. I am researching on the PHY layer of broadband wireless communications but these books are relevant to any engineering student working in the area of communications, signal processing, etc. I will be reviewing few books which I thought were really good reads and made things very clear. Sometimes you read books filled with equations but you really cannot grasp the idea. The books I will be talking about here are the ones which made me really understand things from the basics. So here you go.

1. Understanding Digital Signal Processing – Richard G. Lyons

I have been studying about OFDM for couple of years before I picked this book up. This book starts with the very basics and goes on to talk about complex methods in signal processing but yet in very simple terms. This is one of my favorite tech books. I can recommend only two books to learn about DSP concepts like DFT or Nyquist sampling, from what I have read so far, one is this book and the other is The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing which I mention next. This book has lots of examples and figures and less equations. But don’t this this book is only for beginners as the books dives in to very complex topics too. YOu will not find any “the proof of this theorem is left as an exercise to the reader…”. I hate when that happens as it is usually the important ones they the authors leave as “the proof is trivial and left to the reader…”. This is the ideal place to start learning DSP.

2. The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven – W. Smith

This book is available for free (you can also but the hardcopy) from here http://www.dspguide.com. This book falls in to the same caterogory as the previous book. Starts  from the beginning and has lots of examples and figure based explanations rather than piling up on the equations. Ideal place to start learning about sampling, DFT, etc.

3. Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems - B.P. Lathi

In my opinion, this is like the bible of digital and analog communications for anybody starting in the communications field. It has topic from fundmental of probability to analog communications to digital modulators/demodulators to OFDM and everything in between. This is a pretty book and it covers a vast amount of contents. Topics are comprehensively explained from the beginning. This is a one-stop book for all the major topics regarding communications. There are dedicated books out there for information theory, but the information theory chapter in this book explained it the best for me. This book derives the Shannon’s capacity formula from the fundamental equations of information theory (they are also derived in the book) rather than just putting the equation in your face. Another example of the awesomeness of this book is it’s chapter (rather a subsection of a chapter) of MMO. There are dedicated MIMO books with literally hundreds of equations talking about the capacity of a MIMO channel, but how many of those books actually derive the basic MIMO capacity formula? You will mostly find a reference to the derivation. This book derives the MIMO capacity formula. An absolutely highly recommended book.

4. Intuitive probability and random processes using matlab – S.M. Kay

I am a big fan of S.M. Kay when it comes to probability. As one of my least favorite subjects and also one I cannot get away with, Kay has made the topic intersting and less difficult to learn. I bought this book after I read Statistical Signal Processing by Kay. I really liked it so picked this book up too. He starts with the very basics of probability. Even the most fundamental probability equations are derived, in an intuitive way. This is a very easy read and also covers lots of basic as well as advanced topics. S.M. Kay has a very cool way of explaining things which is very easy on the brain.

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