Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists

This is not a book for you if all you want is out-of-the-box code to use without any work. Over the years I've dabbled in DSP using various books and classes to try to understand all the algorithms. What impressed me about this book is that it is written very clearly, with concise descriptions of what, why, and how, covering most aspects and uses. Smith describes the algorithms in great detail without the calculus; which is great for beginners. For those who are "experts" and learned (memorized) the algorithms or went directly to DSP library routines, the descriptions and logic Smith gives adds immensely to the understanding of the underlying calculus. Before purchasing the book I read most of the previous reviews because I did not want to buy something I already knew or was covered in the books I already have. I was impresses by the positive reviews. The reviews biggest negative was the example programs written in Basic. The complaint was that real scientists and engineers don't use Basic. And that may be true. I too wanted something directly out of the box that I could use immediately. What I lost with that attitude is not grasping the fundamentals. However, there are two big positives to the Basic examples. One: Basic is basic. You won't get bogged down in the syntax and it's easy to understand what is going on in the code. Two: It is easy to port to any other language. I highly recommend this book if you want to understand the fundamentals. Some theoretical aspects are covered in the last sections. You get the insight to learn why you did not get the result you expected. And, as a by-product, you get the understanding that allows you to write your own code. This is not a book that needs to be read linearly. If you already know the basics, you can go directly to those chapters you are most interested in.

This is a great reference book for signal processing. I only wish I had it as a supplement when I first learned DSP. It avoids using mathematical expressions and equations as the sole method of explaining signal processing, as many signal processing books tend to do, and it does a great job of using examples to illustrate many topics. I find that the math of signal processing can get rather messy to follow, so this book is a great middle ground between mathematical rigor and examples. I highly recommend this book to any student who wants a good supplement for their DSP/Continuous class. I also recommend this to anyone just wanting to brush up on their signal processing or want a basic reference in signal processing. This book is probably intended for people just learning signal processing or who are rusty on the fundamentals. That said, it's not a "dumbed-down" signal processing book by any means. In fact, he puts some more advanced signal processing topics about filters in chapters 14-21. He has some good chapters with applications in chapters 22-29, and the final 4 chapters provide a very good reference for complex numbers and transformations (Complex Fourier Transform, Laplace Transform, and the z-Transform). The book is available online, but you probably know that if you're at Amazon, because he includes a link to purchase a bound copy. There are no homework problems within the book, but he includes homework problems you can do at his website--Google "Digital Signal Processing for Engineers and Scientists" to find it--for chapters 2-13 available for download in a .txt file. Overall, this is an excellent book that explains signal processing in an easy to follow manner. Note, there is a cd that's included with each copy, if you buy it new, containing homework problems, source code, and the entire ebook. So, if you get a used copy, that's something to consider.

I studied the underlying theory and math many years ago in school, but never had an opportunity to apply it. When I came across this book a few years ago, I read it and got very interested in DSP applications. Now that inexpensive DSP microcontrollers are available, it makes sense to use DSP in many more applications. The software examples in this book are written in BASIC, which makes them easy to follow and understand. If you want software written in more contemporary languages, it's easy to find on the internet. And the CMSIS library is available for free and provides excellent software for use on DSP microcontrollers. This book has become a classic reference for personal libraries and is getting more expensive and more difficult to obtain. I already had an old copy but wanted to get a nicer copy with the original CD for my library before it's no longer available.

(Sorry I don't speak English) Brief introduction: I graduated long time ago as an Electronics Engineer, at that time DSP wasn't tought at my university (only analog signal processing was tought). I've worker as a "software engineer" since 2000. In this context I had forgotten almost everything about filters, this book helped me understand the mechanisms and the math of DSP. The book is ordered very clear and nice to read, the concepts are approached gradually so before delving into the math or computer algorithms you have the big picture. The computer code is written in a pseudo-basic which is simple and clear to understand, for me it was very easy to translate the algoritms and get them working in C++

I'm a software (and hardware) engineer who wants to use DSP as a tool in some projects. I'm not a mathematician, and wanted both a practical and intuitive description of the subject. The book delivers on this - VERY well. It uses a series of step-by-step, diagrams, analogies, and very simple pseudo-code to describe everything discussed. It avoids discussing things in a mathematical language that I cannot comprehend (like Wikipedia articles do). I've gone off and applied these lessons to audio encoding/decoding, and even computer-vision stuff. So if you really want an intuitive understanding of this stuff - definitive the book for you. The only critisizm I have - is it would perhaps be good to give you some working, tutorialized, hands-on type of things. For example, I have gone off and modeled a lot of the stuff discussed in C-code, Perl scripts, Scilab projects (which I had to learn), and Excel spreadsheets. It would be nice if they - for example - took some of the basic things they were doing, and gave you something akin to an Excel spreadsheet to give you some hands-on illustrative work. Nonetheless, it was easily descriptive enough so that I could knowledgeably go off and do these things on my own!

You can read this book on dspguide.com, but if you are like me you prefer to have a printed copy. This book is meant for beginners to the field, but it covers quite a range of material with particular attention to building up your intuition. I havent finished it, but am finding it very enjoyable. The author is a natural born explainer. The sample code is in Basic, sure, but you can easily translate it into your favorite language. The mathematics is rather easy, and may seem long winded to a mathematically oriented person, but such a person should be able to condense the explanation with no trouble. What's also nice it that it covers many aspects of the field, like signal processing by specialised hardware. I have recommended it to people who are interested in digital photography and want to have a deeper understanding.

Sorry for the unprofessional title of this review, but it really hits home for what this book delivers. Just to note, this book is available free from the author's website, but after reading the first 8 chapters I realized I needed to pay homage and buy the real book. Practical, Illustrative, Clear, Entertaining are all adjectives that describe this book. This book partly inspired me to go back for my Masters degree in EE for Signal Processing (which, turns out now-a-days is more about statistics and optimization theory then anything else). In short, the author does an amazing job explaining a complex subject in clear "discrete" terms which make it easy for a EE or anyone else with a mild amount of programming experience to understand. Well done Sir!

Useful introductory book

This book stands out as an example of clear technical writing. Every concept is introduced carefully and is explained 3 ways: with equations, with example graphs, and with code. The equations are always explained and they start very simple (taking the mean of samples). Every equation has a margin note reminding you what it's about and what all the variables mean - ideal if you delve into the book, or pick it up after a few days, you don't have to go back pages to try to find out what the nomenclature is. The graphs are by way of examples. For instance when explaining signal to noise ratios there are graphs of signals with various ratios so you can get a feel of how corrupted these signals would be. The code is simple. I was shocked innitially because it's in BASIC! Yuck. But in fact this doesn't matter, it's short, simple, commented, and can be straightforwardly translated into some other language. It does the job. The book leaves the hard maths to the end, which is a real relief after other DSP books and web articles. But it's there, and the author really succeeds in getting across the "meaning" of Laplace and Z spaces. There are some unexpected inclusions, such as a large section on neural networks - I had not seen this covered as DSP before. This book would suit either for student study (there are no exercises), or stand-alone for those wishing to implement some DSP in a real design. There's a CD-ROM whivh I haven't looked at. As far as I know it includes all the code samples - one improvement might be for these to be included in C, if only on the disk.

I found this book ideally aimed at my level of expertise (computer science background with a touch of physics). The book was practical (not a huge amount of derivation) & the diagrams clear. I also really appreciated the PDFs being available for free on-line. On the basis of the first 4 chapters, I purchased the book. Recommended.

This book is just good for someone who is looking forward to understand DSP concepts and it is also great for someone who is not having much prior signal processing knowledge but need to understand the stuff to get work done.

C'est le livre qu'il faut avoir pour savoir.

Il libro più chiaro sull'argomento! Decisamente ottimo per iniziare.