Customer Reviews

Digital Signal Processing

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"Digital Signal Processing" by Oppenheim and Schafer was, until the publication of their revised book "Discrete-time Signal Processing", the best DSP reference book.

While I would not recommend this book for self-study, I would recommend it as a reference text for someone who has done or is doing a DSP course.

Be advised --- the new version, "Discrete-time Signal Processing", is more up-to-date.

This book "DSP" from Oppenheim & Schafer (O&S) is to digital signal processing what Kernighan & Ritchie "The C Programming Language" is to programming: an indispensable classic.

I learned DSP back in 1982 with a bunch of photocopies of this book. Today I own two O&S copies: one hardcover (at home) and one paperback at work. I don't remember finding a mistake, or even a typo, in the book, which nevertheless never went beyond the first edition (the 3 sequels "Discrete-Time Signal Processing" from the same authors are already geared to "textbooks"...). Back in 1975 there were book reviewers (or cautious authors...) that made their best to eliminate the mistakes that plague many modern books.

One of my DSP teachers said that one senior guy had told him how to learn DSP by himself: read O&S, chapter by chapter, and do 10 random selected problems from each chapter. So he did and he has since then published several important papers on DSP... Recently I had to review, seriously, random discrete signal processing and power spectrum estimation: the most readable pieces on these matters which I found were, precisely, O&S chapters 8 and 11.

In the last years I'm teaching DSP at one University. I've already got a dozen DSP books, ancient and modern, but O&S is still the reference I recur the most. If you could cross "DSP" from O&S with Lyon's "Understanding Digital Signal Processing (2nd Edition)", you would get the perfect DSP book: on the one hand, Lyons' is too verbose and avoids somewhat mathematics (by choice), but provides perhaps the best explanations on DSP you can find; on the other hand, O&S provide rigorous equations and both deep and broad coverage of DSP foundations.

If you want really to understand DSP, have a decent Math training (average Calculus, Complex Variables, Fourier Analysis skills), the book from Oppenheim and Schafer is in the top of the list I would give you to learn DSP.

A brief table of contents (adapted): (1) Discrete-time Signals and Systems. (2) The Z-Transform. (3) The DFT. (4) Graphs and Matrix Representations of Digital Filters. (5) Digital Filter Design Techniques. (6) Computation of the DFT. (7) Discrete Hilbert Transforms. (8) Discrete Random Signals. (9) Finite Precision Effects. (10) Homomorphic Signal Processing. (11) Power Spectrum Estimation.

In dsp course we are using this book. The problem with this book is that it does not provide formulas for many dsp calculations. Thus, I need to find formula tables else where. Besides, there are not enough examples to further understandsings of the materials.