Lawrence R. Rabiner

Only compliments I can give are that the main talking points per section are likely correct, and that in some situations you may end up stuck with the book. Otherwise it's possibly the worst textbook I've ever dealt with. Rabiner and Schafer's writing style is like 60 students who didn't communicate with each other, discussing a field they have a tenuous grasp of, writing off of class notes they only partially understand. There's explanations that don't match the conclusions, sequences of show more multiple preambles leading nowhere, math that contradicts the text, terminology used before being defined, multiple terms used for the same thing, one term used to mean different things in the same sentence (that one I've never seen before)... You spend more time figuring out what the authors were _attempting_ to say than actually retaining useful information. You cannot trust the text to be actually correct or self-consistent. This may sound like I'm nitpicking a few moments here and there within a 1000 page textbook. No. There are pages you can be stuck on for multiple hours because every single sentence has some kind of error. This book needs to go through an editor before it is useful for anyone. Avoid at all costs. show less