Hi Frank:
I am familiar with 3 DSL books. Two more books will
appear in the near future.
a) Walter Chen's book is poorly written from a stylistic
point of view (lots of sentences with faulty grammar).
However, it is the most comprehensive, since he takes
the reader through the evolution DSL (ISDN) > HDSL
> ADSL (CAP and DMT), and covers also HDSL2 and VDSL
for which standards had not been adopted when the book
was completed (the HDSL2 standard is now essentially
complete). Walter Chen spent a large part of his career at Bellcore
(his PhD was essentially supervised by JJ Werner) before
moving to Texas Instruments and then Motorola. He was therefore
involved with T1E1 standards discussions for a long time.
So, his book is very insightful for professionals who want to
gain some insight on why a certain technology was adopted
for a certain standard. In other words, the book is
primarily addressed at a narrow technical audience. Another
strong point is that Walter Chen is rather unbiased in
his discussions of CAP vs DMT, and all standards battles
in general.
b) The book by Silverman, Cioffi et al. focuses primarily
on ADSL and VDSL, and within this realm, primarily on DMT.
For anyone interested in ADSL's DMT standard, the book is excellent,
but DSL, HDSL, and HDSL2 are barely discussed. In other words,
the book is narrow and slightly biased, but really very good
within this narrow range. It is also addressed at technically
advanced professionals. One thing that pays almost entirely
for the price of the book is the CD ROM containing most of
the T1E1 submissions between 92 and 98. These documents
are difficult to get hold of, and it is really nice to
have them all in one place.
c) The book by Rauschmayer on ADSL/VDSL is very well written,
and requires the least in terms of communications theory
background. He explains things very well. However, professionals
will find it slightly shallow.
One book that I am eagerly awaiting is John Bingham's
book on multicarrier modulation (i.e. DMT or OFDM). He wrote
a very fine survey on this topic several years ago, and his
book on modem design is a classic.
So, if I had to teach a course on DSL technologies, I would
probably require the book by Silverman et al, with Chen's
book as optional additional reading.
Best regards,
Bernard Levy
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