Table of contents & the books description seem a little gloomy to anyone else?
GNU Radio, filters, AM/FM, IQ demod ... I remember working through all these topics on GNU Radio Tutorials wiki [0] but I don't know if the book offers anything more of value?
Also, if the authors focus on GNU Radio as their software stack why would they not include a chapter on creating your own Python Blocks which is the biggest upside (imo) to GNU Radio. I love SDRs and think anyone interested in electrical engineering should play around with them. I dont know if I'd recommend this book based off what the sample chapter 4 provided.
I think sending people directly to GNU Radio is a bit of a risk. Sending folks that just learned how to spell SDR deep into the bowels of DSP is a bit steep of a learning curve that many might equate with a brick wall.
A little over ten years ago (!) I got started with a windows box, sdrsharp and a cheap RTL-based SDR. Just cruising around the spectrum, clicking on signals that were interesting, cobbling together decoding pipelines and getting real results was a way better way for me. Getting started with software that works and interesting use cases you can get into with cheap hardware got me hooked and THEN I had something that I was genuinely craving an understanding of to drive me into GNU Radio.
Agreed, GNU Radio exists in this weird no-mans land where it works on low-level concepts wired up with high-level guis. Do not want. I want to playing with CubicSDR to zoom around the spectrum, then if I I need to do anything fancy with the data, switch over to signal processing and start writing code.