Ezio Biglieri has again written a good text on Digital Communications, following his popular book on TCM (Trellis-Coded Modulation). This book avoided the pitfall of covering too much material, but only barely. Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of excellent and state-of-the-art knowledge in this book, but the problem is exactly that there's a lot of excellent and state-of-the-art knowledge in this book. I see this book more along the idea of Proakis' "Digital Communications" book, which is a reference first, tutorial second, although this book is much easier to read than Proakis' book.

Although the title suggests strong emphasis on wireless communications (which is good), most of the book applies to the general notion of Digital Communications, and even includes a chapter on Voltaire channels (dispersive channels). There are several small sections on the very recent research results, such as turbo codes and belief propagation decoding. This is very nice, but it's also very brief. Too brief to be a tutorial.

So if you're looking for an alternative to Proakis' "Digital Communications", this is a no-compromise alternative in terms of coverage.