Customer Reviews

Signal Processing First (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I consider this book as a signal processing enabling book and I use it with my students at the University as an introduction, previous to networking or Multimedia specific subjects. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a gentle introduction to digital signal processing, and is no willing to pass through a high math path. The math's are there but in their just proportion. The author is concerned about concepts, and the movies on the CD are of great help in order to get them. Th introduction to complex notation, difference equations and convolution are the gentles I've read. If you manage to solve the numeric exercises, you end with working concepts and skills in the area. The authors try to give examples from several fields like sounds, pictures and video in order to make the material understandable. Its not a very rigorous book but is a valuable one if you prefer concepts to mathematical rigor. After working the proposed projects, you can deal with filtering, image analysis, sampling, aliasing and several other signal processing techniques knowing what you are doing.

This book, along with "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" and Steiglitz' "DSP Primer" are the best, most useful, yet gentle introductions to DSP I have ever read. If only I had this book before I entered grad school! The CD-ROM that comes with it is very well done; a brilliant presentation! Highly recommended.

This is by far the best introductory DSP book - forget the rest and get this one. The authors take you by the hand and with their years of teaching and research experience, lead you step by step into the strange and unique world of DSP. The CD examples, animations, and audio summaries are extremely valuable. Make sure that you look at them, only then will you really "get it", instead of being just an equation manipulator. This book is also very well suited for self-study professional engineer. Bravo! The standard has been set, let's see if other authors can follow.

I think this book is absolutely outstanding. I don't understand any of the negative comments. The cd that comes with the book is indispensble. It provides example after example. I actually bought schaum's outline of dsp as well, but because of all the examples on the cd (they are handwritten) I don't even have a need to refer to the outline.

In addition, I thought the content of the chapters to be very readable. The only downside is that because the book is dated 1998 the matlab code is out of date and some of the drills no longer work with the newer versions.

This book is a great introductory book on analog and digital signals. It doesn't require any previous knowledge on signals and systems. It is student friendly, and can help alot in understanding the basics of the topic. I recommend this book to all those who would like to take an idea about signals.

In the first few chapters of the book, the authors do presume 2 things. 1) You know something about switching between cos terms and imaginary numbers (Euler), and 2) You have access Matlab to run the code peppered throughout the book.

1) Well, the truth is you need to grind through some of these alternative ways of representing a sinusoid. If you are a little weak in an area of say how to get the real part of e^i(theta*t), you will struggle for a while. But I think the struggle is part of the learning process anyway, so not such a bad thing (there are helpful review topics in the back of the book).

2)As for needing Matlab to get any benefit from the book, just download Octave. It will run most m files and give you 2d and 3d plots. So Matlab in not an issue.

The book offers a lot of media demos i.e. a short movie of how a positive and negative frequency (opposite rotating Phasor's) can combine to create a real result. Aliasing, short explanation on generating musical note frequencies. etc.

I am only through the 1st 3 chapters, but I feel that the book is doing what it is supposed to do, help me learn some fundamentals. I will read Lyons book next, and I would bet that it will be much easier reading after the foundation I have built up from this one. Caveat: I am doing this just for my own enjoyment, so I am not under a time constraint that a student might be. I also expect I will need to read several other books as well to get proficient at DSP. But I do think this one has quite a bit to offer. Ya gotta put some work into it.

If DSP was easy, everybody would be doing it! :)

I have been using this book for my master's course and this is the first time I have understood DSP. And it feels great to finally have grasped the fundamentals of the subject that has long evaded me. The treatment in this book is very unique and novel. And the mathematics is used as a tool to help understanding the concepts and not given in the form of pages of proofs in which the reader can get lost. I salute authors for coming out with such an original and easy-to-understand approach to the subject.
Highly recommended!

I'm not sure who wrote the positive reviews here, but I can tell you as a student using this book that it is among the worst I've ever been stuck with and most of my classmates seem to agree.

The concepts are made much more difficult than they should be by poor writing. The authors jump around constantly, use new terminology at times before introducing it, and provide examples that are inadequate in helping to solve the problems at the end of the chapter. Stylistically, the writing is very bland and sure to put you to sleep. The first sentence of the book is "This is a book about signals and systems."

Sure, this book may cover all of the core concepts involved in signal processing, but trying to make sense of it when you don't already have a background in the subject is quite a challenge. After reading the chapters, we were unable to solve most of the problems in the book until the answers were given to us. I've dealt with bad textbooks before, but this one tops them all. Needless to say, it was a very frustrating experience and I can't say I recommend this book.

My only complaint is that some of the algebra should be worked out with a few more intermediate steps. The worked out homework problems are fabulous and sooo plentiful.

I wish I had the time to really read the whole book. My ECE201 course will probably only cover around 6 chapters.

This concept behind this book is to introduce students to one of the more difficult aspects of ECE before they have even started the curriculum. I'm not sure how it is implemented at other colleges but at my college it is very much like a line from the original Willy Wonka movie:

"I've just decided to switch our Friday schedule to Monday, which means that the test we take each Friday on what we learned during the week will now take place on Monday before we've learned it. But since today is Tuesday, it doesn't matter in the slightest. Pencils ready!"

In short, this book CANNOT, by itself, teach you what you need to know. It is far too truncated and assumes you already know things you might well not. Furthermore, if the book is implemented as it is intended, the student isn't ready for the material contained in the book. On top of that, a critical component of the book is the Matlab portion. Which presumably some college integrate into an actual lab portion of the class. My college does not, and if you were trying to learn it by yourself..well obviously you wouldn't have a TA helping you. So, without a lab, you are at a complete loss for doing a critical part of the book...unless of course you already know Matlab.

This book is terrible, its implementation (at least at my college) is beyond terrible, and I can't imagine anyone using it to self teach without SEVERAL other textbooks to assist.

B.T.W. I'm sure professors, grad students, and people who already have a firm grasp of the all the unstated prerequisites for this book absolutely love the book. It seems like an advanced Schaum's outline pretending to be an introductory text...absolutely amazingly horrid, I hate it! and you should too!

OH and, as another reviewer pointed out. This book is NOT the same as DSP First: A Multimedia Approach, which I have not used and can't say anything about.