Customer Reviews

Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists

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As a graduate student in DSP, I highly recommend this book to anybody who would like to get an overview of digital signal processing. However, you should know what you're buying. Download the free version from the website first to check it out. This is not a textbook for a DSP course. Treat it as you would an encyclopedia -- you don't use the encyclopedia to do major research, you use it to get an introduction to the topic and get ideas on what you want to pursue. Some mathematically-inclined people are able to understand what the equations are saying right away, but others may need to learn through different ways. This book offers that alternative way, by explaining in understandable English what's going on. To grasp the real beauty and applications of DSP, you'll still need to eventually use the equations, but this book is a good start to gaining insight in what those equations mean.

Even though I already have the predecessor to this book described on www.dspguide.com, I purchased this 2003 version to stay current. What makes this book great are how clear the explanations are to a number of core DSP areas that are often poorly explained like overlap-add fast convolution while still covering some unusual things that are rarely discussed (neural net filter design?!) along with practical cookbook techniques. And all this with charts, graphs, and clear-as-ice examples in BASIC, hoorah! Steven is egoless in terms of presenting the useful stuff - he's not trying to show off his math, he's just trying to help you understand. :D

This book gives you all the neccessary tools to understand the fundamental principles that drive DSP. One example would be the chapter on the Laplace Transform. He takes a topic that most other DSP books give a cursory glance, treats it with great care, trying to let you grasp the fundamentals of Laplace transform so that you would'nt have trouble in understanding the significance of poles and zeros.

And Steve gives you many ways to look at a DSP topic :

- Through carefully selected figures that mesh well with the topic - Through less maths -Third and the most important, simple to understand programs written in Basic to enable you to visualize the algorithm though programs.

His style is steeped with practical wisdom and with painstaking attention to details. It is no wonder that this would be one of the most important books for the beginner in DSP that would equally rank with that of Richard Lyons.

Where ever the Steve uses maths, you almost always expect him to explain its physical interpretation and its practical significance.

I loved his convolution Machine analogy. I hope you will find many more gems in this wonderful book on DSP.

Coming to DSP from a non-mathematical back ground I wanted a DSP guide that would allow me to 'do something' useful, quickly for a biomedical signal processing applicition- but I initally had difficulty finding a good textbook.

I painfully struggled through Lathi's "Signal Processing and Linear Systems" with little to show for it. Lyons' "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" was very good at explanation (I recommend it) but somewhat lacked a practical focus. In the end "DSP a Practical Guide" turned out to be even clearer and easier to read than Lyons while being more complete and having a more practical focus.

The book is punctuated with practical examples- sonar, audio processing, code optimisation and accompanying BASIC. After literally a few hours of reading I applied some provided algorithms to clean up an EKG signal (with considerable success).

I found the chapter on neural networks to be so clear and enthralling it became a 'toilet read'- certainly a first for a book of this genre :) - the sections on image processing, audio processing and data compression are likewise accessible.

The only caveat with this book is that those seeking a rigorous 'first principles' mathematical analysis of DSP (Lathi style) may be disappointed by the conceptual focus- a lot of the 'harder' items like Laplace and complex fourier come towards the latter half of the book.
Purchasers should also note that there seem to be differences in the composition of the similar hardback versions of the book (I have the softcover).

This is a great book. You wouldn't expect to be able to read a DSP text from cover to cover like a novel, but this one makes it enjoyable. The information is presented with basic math, allowing the reader to concentrate on the concepts and the mechanics at a manageable level (no painful derivation type discussions). I highly recommend this text to those that want to get a working knowledge of DSP without having to have a pencil, paper, calculator, etc. to follow through the text.

You will not be dissapointed in this book.

This is the book that your professor should have chosen for your first DSP course but probably didn't because he's used to the standard, awful, gut-wrenching texts that predominate in this field.

For engineering students struggling through the horrors of a sophomore weed-out course in signals and systems, this book can give you the "big picture" that your professor is just not interested in talking about. (For these students I also recommend "Signals and Systems Made Ridiculously Simple" by Zoher Z. Karu).

In either case, and especially for the practicing engineer, this is just about the finest reference book on DSP that I have ever come across, and I have plouged through quite a few of them. The author has a real gift for presenting this convoluted subject in a very clear and precise style. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I want to take a copy of this book and throw it through my Signal and Systems professor's window with a note that says, "Why couldn't you have taught it to me this way?"

This book makes sense of all the mathematical nonsense in my college course so many years ago.

This book literally picks up the reader and carries them through an impressive (read: large, scary, and dangerous!) body of information incredibly effectively, smoothly, and effortlessly. You can't help, but feel empowered afterwards!

I've been away from my EE background for 15+ years working on embedded real-time software. I picked up this book six months ago in what was a very modest attempt to familiarize myself with DSP and filters only enough to carry conversations with some new ME/Controls co-workers! The book ignited my interest (mainly by giving me a jolt of confidence!) in the subject such that I've spent the last few months delving into more "formal" DSP and reviewing some college math. In fact, I wanted to write a good review months ago, but it is now that I appreciate S. W. Smith's great work even more.

The simple and friendly language of the book is apparent, but the organization of the subject matter - so carefully weaved together - is absolutely nothing like the other pedantic introductory books on DSP. In summary, while it prepares the reader for practical DSP applications, the book is nothing like some other dull cook-book, get-rich, "for-the-working-professional" books. This one has a heart!

I'm a physicist and have used Fourier transforms in data analysis, and am seeking to use Laplace transforms too. I've been working with 6 texts and various onlne references and class notes about Laplace transforms.
The online .pdf version of this book says that, like Fourier transforms treat signals as being composed of sinusoids, Laplace transforms treat them as being composed of sinusoids and exponentials. It also says the Fourier transform is a special case of the Laplace, and appears on the vertical axis of the s plane.
These seem to me to be the two first and most important things to understand about the Laplace transform, and I didn't get them out of ANY of the other references. Now that I understand this, I can't imagine why other authors approach the topic in such an obscure way. And so many barely grasped notions are suddenly popping into place!
I am buying this book now, in paper form. It's well worth it to have both formats. This is the magical book I was wishing for - and I'm interested in the transforms for other reasons, I'm not even doing DSP in the classic sense!

My 40 year old MSEE needed some refreshing on digital signal processing, FFT, FIR and IIR filters. This book read like a novel! A great addition to my EEE/Programming library. I've used it daily since it arrived for the development of real time signal processing software to be used by the amateur radio community.