This book contains material that should interest students of electrical
engineering and computer science specializing in digital communications
and also practicing electrical engineers who apply digital
communications techni- ques to telecommunication systems, digital radio,
digital satellites, fiber optics, and the physical layer of computer
networks. This book is an outgrowth of lecture notes prepared over a
number of years at various universities. In the earlier years I
benefited immensely from t 5 the excellent textbooks and monographs in
preparing my notes. - With passing time I had to rely more and more on
the current periodical literature, mainly the IEEE Transactions and the
Bell System Technical Journal. Although the book is intended mainly for
those who have already had an introduction to communications, as usually
taught in an undergraduate course, it can also be used without this
background. For that purpose I concentrated most of the necessary
mathematics in Chapter I. If the mathematics is not an obstacle, the
reader can start with Chapter 2. I tried, as far as possible, to make
each chapter independent of the other chapters, and for that reason many
concepts and notations have been defined several times. To keep the book
at a reasonable length, however, it was impossible, in most cases, not
to rely on derivations and results of previous chapters.