general

Probability and Random Processes for Electrical Engineering is not a very well-written book. The book seems to be gaining more favor with EE and computer science programs, not because of the quality of the book, but rather the need to standardize on texts, regardless of the quality.

The book itself is extremely sketchy and lacks mathematical rigor, perhaps because it is supposed to be meant for engineers and not for math majors, but even so it does not explain its subject very well, even though preface states that it is accessible. For example, the concept of counting theory is extremely important in probabiity, but the author devotes a total of six pages to the subject and even notes that counting theory can be skipped without loss of continuity. I don't think so! Also the author's definitions of discrete and continous sample spaces are not quite correct.

There are not enough examples outlined in the book and many of the homework problems have little relevance to the examples presented. A good instructor could make something out of this book, but be sure to get a Schaum's outline for more problems and another text to complement this one.

I am a graduate student using this book in a class. I would really like to warn other people from using it.

The book describes everything with a lot of examples. As a result of this you do not get a basic understanding, but rather some examples that you can adapt and use for a problem that you have to solve.

It is like learning that a wheel is turning because you might turn it with your hand, rather than because you are applying a torque to it. Or that a lamp is turned on because you might hit the switch, rather than because a current flows through it.

For some reason everything has to be described with CDFs instead of PDFs in the book. It seems like PDFs are something that is difficult to imagine for the author.

I once had a teacher in a class, and a book containing a lot of examples like this one. He claimed that he could write everything the book contained on 2 pages - He was right!! I think the same thing could be done with this book.

Do not choose this book. It is highly unrecommended.

This book is just god awful. I think probablity theory is a very fascinating subject, however, I don't think this is a good book to learn it from.

Where do I begin:

-The biggest grip I have with this book is the problem set. The problems in this book are, literally, just plain hard. The author expects you to do problems,using the techniques they used in proving an actual theorem! I'm not talking about using the actual theorem, but the actual steps they used. I'm an undergrad in a graduate course, and most of the graduate students aren't even doing well on the homework assignments. I consider myself a pretty decent student. I was able to learn DSP using the Oppenheim book(with the aid of a teacher's solution manual of course). The problems in this book are harder than the problems in Oppenheim's DSP book(and I have a teachers solution manual for this prob. book). The bottomline is that 80-100 problems per chapter won't do anyone any good if they can't solve those problems.

-The author's notation is extremely weird, confusing, and downright bad.

-I just have the strangest feeling that the author is trying to make the students,whom are using the text, feel like they're stupid.

-This book is nine years old. I think the author should rewrite the text from scratch.

-My instructor is literally terrible, so I'm going through a lot of hell in this course.

-And finally, the author, when explaining the theory, uses alot of tedious reasoning and formulas when doing certain theorems. For example, when he's explaining the concept of a bernoulli distribution, the author uses the indicator function to explain the concept. This is not even needed to explain this concept(I have checked this several books, and this was not done), and it's a bit tedious and pointless to include it in the theory.

-My communication systems teacher told our class last semester, that learning from enigneering books is not a good way to learn material. This is all because the authors like to show off their intellectual skill and nothing more. They usually forget to include problems by the time of publishing, and have to delay the release of the book to include problems. And what do they include, diffcult problems, which are really not needed to learn introductory concepts.