However... when you really get into this book, you will quickly realize it is pretty worthless.

For example chapter 3 is over 100 pages long. It is called random variables. In this single chapter they introduce random variables, functions of random variables, expectation of R.V. and functions of R.V., Markov and Chebyshev inequalities as well as Moment generating functions and Characteristic functions, entropy as well as a few others. I hope you are thinking WHEW!! This should have easily been 2 or 3 chapters.

Now to boot, there are 160 end of chapter problems! In the chapter there are 71 examples, BUT only about 20 of them are actually useful. The other 51 examples are strange things like Ex. What does the greek character rho mean? It means an outcome! That is not an example in my book. Meanwhile the end of chapter problems are like Q. Take the Laplace transform of the characteristic function and show that it is a Cauchy R.V. Right... and that is in the book where. Oh yeah, I get it, I am just suppose to be able to piece that together from this amazing book and its 71 examples, whatever.

Now, there is a solution manual available for this book with worked out problems. Guess how many are done in chapter 3? There are 34 worked out problems, and they are all of the easiest problems. Out of those 34 problems, only one of them uses the characteristic function. Yet, there are about 50 problems at the end of the chapter on characteristic functions.

Overall I am very dissapointed in this book. No worthwhile examples and the explainations are very weak at times. Compared to Papoulis this book is perhaps equal. However when you are comparing stinky socks to rotten eggs...

10 of 11 found the following review helpful:


What a terrible book  Apr 07, 2004 By Carsten Poulsen
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.

7 of 7 found the following review helpful:


Used in Graduate Class on Probability and Random Processes  Mar 24, 2000
I used this book for a graduate class in Probaility and Random Processes and we covered every chapter. I gave the book three stars based on other probability books I have used, but compared to other engineering books I would rate it lower.

I feel main problem with the book is the examples not very helpful in solving the 100+ problems that accompany each chapter. Most of the examples were just useless explanations graphs. The book also seems to gloss over some of the important concepts needed to solve the homework problems. The only homework problems that I found useful were the MATLAB examples. I would recommend doing these problems even if they are not assigned.

The book also does a poor job covering applications, especially in the later chapters on random processes. I would have been interested in more signal processing and communications applications, the main reason I took a course on probability and random processes.

As far a background for a person using this book, I would recommend the person be graduate student with a solid math background.

15 of 18 found the following review helpful:


Too much compromise to be a usable textbook  Jan 11, 2000 By Ryuji Suzuki
This book may not be too friendly to those who are unfamiliar with the subject. This is because the subject is unfriendly. Before you complain about this book, take a look at the other books on the subject to realize that the author took a great effort to make it accessible. However, I personally do not like the degree of compromise made in this book. Too many uninsightful examples, and lacking detailed discussions. This cannot be a good reference book. For reference, I like Papoulis, for enjoy reading deep insights, I like Gardner, and I recommend Peebles for people who hated this book. However, Leon-Garcia is easier to read and faster moving than Papoulis and Gardner. It is not easy attempting to combine mathematical rigor (which this book still lacks) and engineering point of view from many application areas in one text book. Three stars because I like other books better, but this should be the lower bound of evaluation given to this book.

9 of 10 found the following review helpful:


I can't believe something like this even exists!  Sep 25, 2003
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.

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