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This post is about possible beginnings of your journey into the
digital signal processing world.
If we go to the amazon web site and make advanced
search in books department using keywords "digital signal
processing" in title section we will get about 1700 books
with these words in the title. Not as many books as "C++"
search will return (about 5500 books) but still the search result can
leave you in doubt where to start from.
Surely I don't pretend that I read all of these
DSP books, but I have looked through at least several dozens of most
popular ones, so I want to share my experience.
These books vary in complexity level and in amount of prerequisite
knowledge required from readers. Most of these books were intended to
be used by electrical engineering students and engineers and
therefore the knowledge of at least something about complex variables
and their functions, differential equations, calculus and linear
systems theory is supposed.
Today I would like to tell about two DSP books
which stand out from the «classical electrical engineering
textbooks» crowd, because content of these books is accessible even
to reader with only school education.
The first book I would like to tell about is «The Scientist &
Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing» by Steven W. Smith.
This book can be described as «Introduction to DSP (almost) without
use of mathematics».
It's author did amazing work: he managed to tell about most important
DSP concepts, such as convolution, linear digital filtering, ADC/DAC,
FFT, as well as several real life DSP applications, without use of
complex numbers, not to mention differential equations or advanced
calculus. Indeed, author introduced complex numbers no earlier than
in chapter 30, and Laplace Transform, Complex Fourier Transform and Z
Transform even later.
The second book is «Digital Signal Processing: A Computer Science
Perspective » by Stein J.Y. Reading of this book requires about the
same level of prerequisite knowledge as reading of the first book
(«The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal
Processing»), although you will see more formulas and integrals on
the pages of the second one.
The target audience of the second book is computer science students
and graduates which for some reason have to get some knowledge of
basic DSP concepts but don’t wish to go through jungle of formulas
with snake-looking integrals. However I think that this book’s
content can be used by any person with school education (and maybe
some basic knowledge of calculus) to get acquainted with DSP.
Well, but what if you got education in electrical engineering or you
are electrical engineering student, should you spend your time on
these «books for dummies» or not? I think that you probaly should
at least look through these books. The point is that authors of both
books didn’t just rip off formulas from classical textbooks and
serve what is left to readers. Instead they tried to explain
complicated matters in plain English and used simple examples to
provide so much praised «insight» to their readers. And I think
that they succeeded on this task. In my opinion, yes, these books are
definitely worth trying, at least to make sure that you really
understand basic DSP concepts as good as authors do and that you have
«insight» too.
Even more, I would like to say that these books
were written in Richard Feynman spirit. I mean
that in these books quite sophisticated things
are explained with simple language on simple examples. And I treat
this type of textbooks as most valuable among all kinds of textbooks.
