Motivated by problems arising in random sampling of trigonometric polynomials, we derive exponential inequalities for the operator norm of the difference between the sample second moment matrix $n^{-1}U^*U$ and its expectation where $U$ is a complex random $n\times D$ matrix with independent rows. These results immediately imply deviation inequalities for the largest (smallest) eigenvalues of the sample second moment matrix, which in turn lead to results on the condition number of the sample second moment matrix. We also show that trigonometric polynomials in several variables can be learned from $const \cdot D \ln D$ random samples.