I'm reading this book right now, but haven't finished it, but was so pleased with the volume that I wanted to make a few comments. I might have more to say when I complete it.

I bought this book after starting to bone up on digital TV, and realized that I could use a good, comprehensive review on analog TV, on which I'd become rusty. I'm not a professional in the field but an interested amateur, and was looking for a good book on the subject. In fact, it's primarily about digital TV, but there are excellent reviews of analog TV principles, including chapters on wave propagation; frequency sources; basic analog receiver principles and design, with discussions of the most important components, such as modulators and demodulators, amplifier principles; analog to digital conversion; phase locked loops and synchronization issues in general, analog and digital filters, consumer video and networking, cable television, satellite TV, and other topics.

So this book fit the bill. The book covers dozens of topics, from more descriptive to fairly techical, although there isn't too much math. But you still need to remember enough about the most important circuits and devices in the communications field to benefit from it. For example, there is a detailed discussion of why a simple diode-based envelope modulation detector, which is basically employed as a half-wave rectifier, doesn't work very well due to the diode's poor response characteristics, including higher noise, a tendency toward overmodulation distortion, and low power output and amplification, and why a transistor-based one with the collector biased to near saturation is better, providing a 15 to 20 db improvement. And then they explain why synchronous detectors, consisting of a phase-locked loop and multiplier circuits, are even better. The articles often discuss the problem with the basic approaches, as in the above case, and how to resolve them with better and more advanced designs.

Many of the chapters are still pretty technical despite the lack of math, so don't let that fool you. In other words, your background should be at least as good as Schrader's classic, introductory volume on Electronic Communication before reading this, which is a book used in junior college technical courses in electronics.

One chapter I found especially good, although quite dense with information, was the chapter on television reception of signals. It's the best 50-page review of the subject I've seen, and is written by a team of half a dozen authors. The articles are often written by more than one expert in the field.

Subjects covered include analog and digital TV, cable TV, broadcast TV, and satellite TV. The satellite chapter is a little short, but then that would require a whole volume by itself, such as Roddy's volume on the subject, Satellite Communications, which I can also highly recommend.

The book is now seven years old, but keep in mind this is more of an intermediate book covering many of the fundamentals as well as a lot of the more advanced material. Much of it is far beyond the basics, however, although perhaps not at the highest level with all the complex engineering math. My advanced math probably isn't at that level anymore, either, but if you can read and understand this, you'll probably know far more than anyone except an experienced broadcast engineering professional.

This is an impressive volume and despite the price, was money well spent for me given all the quality information, especially considering how difficult it is to condense such a broad field into one book. But this volume does an excellent job of that.