In this dissertation, three multiuser detectors are developed for different application scenarios in direct-sequence code-division multiple access systems. The first detector is an overlapping widow decorrelating detector aimed at asynchronous reverse links. In companion with the design of this detector, a study on the decay property of the ideal decorrelating impulse response is presented, resulting in a quantitative description of the decay rate as a function of the Cholesky factors of the cross-correlation matrix of user signature signals. This result can serve as a guide for determining window length of decorrelating or minimum mean-squared error multiuser detection in asynchronous multiuser systems. Based on this result, a signal-adapted window-length determination algorithm is developed for the proposed detector. Several supporting utilities for efficient implementation of the proposed detector are also described. The second detector is a linear multiuser detector that is also aimed at the reverse links. Particularly, it is desirable for cases where the number of users is small and, thus, significant performance gain over the existing linear multiuser detectors is possible. Unlike in the decorrelating and MMSE detectors, minimizing the bit-error rate is taken as the optimization objective in the proposed detector. To avoid undesired local minima of the highly nonlinear BER cost function, a set of convex constraints is proposed for the optimization problem. It is shown that this constrained optimization problem has a unique solution once the decorrelating detector exists. It is also shown that the proposed detector achieves the best performance among linear detectors for most realistic situations. In addition, a Newton barrier method is developed for efficiently calculating the coefficient vector of the proposed detector (i.e., the solution of the constrained optimization problem). The third detector is an adaptive detector that is aimed at the forward link where information about interfering users is often unavailable. The proposed detector consists of a bank of blind adaptive filters, one for each resolvable path, followed by a channel estimator and a coherent diversity combiner. To allow blind adaptation, the impulse response of each filter is decomposed into two orthogonal parts: one part is fixed as the decorrelating coefficient vector for the path in the absence of interfering users and the other is free to be adapted according to the mean-squared error criterion. Assuming perfect adaptation, the performance of the proposed detector is shown to be between those of the decorrelating detector and the minimum mean-squared error detector. Other studies conducted include the effects of fading on the performance of the proposed detector and the behavior of the proposed blind adaptation algorithm.