AVOID AT ALL COSTS. Please, make sure you read this. If you want to fail this class, do not take this guy. You will NOT understand a single thing that he says in class. If you take Balakrishnan, simply do not go to lectures because you will find that you are wasting time, as he makes absolutely no sense. He keeps scrolling up and down on his slides written in Mathematica... a bunch of equations that make no sense... The book that he assigns is useless. Just find some book on Signals and Systems online and buy it. Any other book that the assigned one will do. But overall, do not take his class if you care about learning the material and if you care about your GPA. This professor is RIDICULOUS...

He is a horrible professor. He doesn't know what is going on half the time and it takes him 25 minutes just to figure out how to plug in his computer and get class started. He teaches a math intensive course with computer slides (which aren't helpful when working out math problems) and glosses over them way to quickly for anyone to process what he is explaining. Only about 1/3 of the class attends and of that 1/3, half of them are asleep because mostly everyone has no idea what he is talking about. Do yourself a favor and don't take him.

Terrible professor, I should have dropped the class while I had the chance. Basically, he cannot teach. No one understands what he's talking about in lecture. He took over EE 102 since Levan is gone, but he does not follow Levan's methods. He does not lecture from the book, he makes up his own lecture files (basically just massive matlab text files which he scrolls through as he talks too fast). He skips intermediate steps so that no one can follow his logic.
The midterm for this class was ridiculous. Most people don't go to lecture, so to reward those who do, he announced that the midterm was open laptop and told people not to let other people know. As a result, only some people knew to bring laptops and the test was largely biased.
Overall the course is terrible. The professor is terrible. I'm forced to learn all the material by myself, I don't get anything out of his lectures. Balakrishnan does not deserve to be a professor at UCLA.