This book was written as a graduate level textbook for engineering students who have had a course in probability and random variables intended for students of engineering or the physical sciences. It is focused primarily on random processes as models for randomly time-varying signals and noise.
It also focuses on what is called the second-order theory of random processes, which treats auto-correlation and spectral density of average power, both second moments of the probability distributions of the process.
faculty.engineering.ucdavis.edu/gardner/
Professor Bernard C. Levy, Chairman of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis, states in a nomination letter:
Dr. Gardner's random processes textbook has several original features which make it stand out among all other textbooks in the same general area. First, it contains a chapter on cyclostationary processes, which have been one of the main topics of research for Dr. Gardner throughout his research career. These processes play a key role in the study of digital communications systems, and virtually all recent digital communications textbooks refer to Dr. Gardner's random processes book as well as to his research papers on cyclostationary signal processing. Another original feature of Dr. Gardner's random processes book is its detailed development of the time-average approach for evaluating the statistics of random signals. This approach provides the theoretical underpinning for the textbook Statistical Spectral Analysis: A Nonprobabilistic Theory which was written by Dr. Gardner for his [graduate level] Spectral Analysis course... . Because of its revolutionary time-average approach (which can be traced back in part to the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener on generalized harmonic analysis), this textbook has been the subject of entertaining exchanges in the Signal Processing Magazine of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. As a consequence of Bill Gardner's courage and vision in pursuing a radically new path, based on the eminently sensible view that the analysis of random signals should be based on statistics extracted from the observed data, this book has had a huge impact on modern spectrum analysis practitioners.