GSM and Personal Communications Handbook by Siegmund Redl, et al is one of the rare technical texts that manages to be both approachable yet technically substantive. Its illustrations are lucid, readily comprehensible yet do not insult the reader’s intelligence. While this may not sound like much of an accomplishment, many other authors who have attempted to illustrate multi-layer communications architectures such as IBM SNA or the OSI Seven-layer model, have fallen flat on their faces.

While the authors demonstrate a clear grasp of the technical workings of GSM, they also provide a rich detailed discussion of the implementation of a GSM network. For those charged with setting up a mobile network, even non-GSM, the network implementation information contained in this book alone makes this book worthwhile.

The authors have also managed to inject a bit of light humor into the text, a rare, delightful and an unexpected surprise in a technical book. For example they explain that as GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications, to say `GSM system’ is redundant. Immediately after that, they tell the reader they will, nevertheless, use the term GSM System with reckless abandon.

One very big surprise are the technical overviews of rival systems incorporated in the book. PDC is covered to an extent and there are light discussions, mostly historical, descriptions of analog systems as well as D-AMPS. However, to find a relatively meaty chapter on CDMA in a book on GSM is almost astounding.

Yet this book contains an overview of CDMA that is technically richer than the most of the stuff you could find in other books devoted to telecommunications and actually explains CDMA technology better than some of the books on CDMA that this reviewer has seen.

Moreover, the authors have taken care to keep their discussions on rival systems relatively free of technical dogma, sticking mostly to objective technical overviews.

Perhaps the only area wanting comes in areas of the technical services incorporated in the GSM standard such as Short Message Services, where the book’s explanations are relatively light.

Nevertheless, this is a minor nit in an otherwise fine effort.

GSM and Personal Communications Handbook is one of the rare technical books that successfully combines approachable writing
Rating: 4 / 5

For myself and my development team, I have found this book to be an excellent way to really understand the technology. The 3gpp standards are of course the last line of authority, but it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of how stuff actually ought to work from reading them alone.

So…read this first.
Rating: 5 / 5

Cons:

Reads more like a term paper.
Rating: 3 / 5