Book Review

Digital Signal Processing
author - Steven W. Smith
Newnes - ©2003

Reader Level

Amazon Rating

Synopsis The full title of the book is Digital Signal Processing, A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists. While theory is not ignored, the book is not a detailed theoretical treatise on the subject of digital signal processing. This book is directed towards users of digital processing such as engineers and scientists who want to use DSPs for signal processing applications. This book presents a good as well as practical overview of all the aspects of digital signal processing with a lot of examples. Interestingly, BASIC is used as the program description language. At first I was a bit skeptical of this, but after reading through a couple of examples I found that from a learning perspective, a simple BASIC program is easier to understand than a C implementation (but not necessarily as a real implementaion!) Advanced mathematic topics are not ignored, but gently introduced as needed. For example, The dreaded z-Transform does not appear until the last couple of chapters. This is a good book for the book shelf of anyone who needs a good overview of what digital signal processing is, as well as a self-learning text and a practical design guide.

Area of Interest
Digital signal processing, digital hardware design, DSP programming

Audience
This book is intended for scientists and hardware designers who have a need to understand and implement digital signal processing solutions. The emphasis is on the practical, not the theoretical. It is not mathematically intensive, but some calculus is required. A basic understanding of analog circuitry is helpful. An understanding of advanced engineering mathematics is required only for the last couple of chapters of the book.

Topics
This book covers all aspects of digital signal processing. The main emphasis is on filtering and image processing.

While The last few chapters of the book cover the more mathematically complex aspects of DSPs such as Laplace Transforms and z-Transforms, unlike typical theoretical texts on the subject most of the presentation of the book is done with very accessible mathematics

Organization
This book is organized in five sections, Foundations, Fundamentals, Digital Filters, Applications, and Complex Techniques.

Chapters 1 through 4 cover the basics of what a signal is, how it is acquired and how it is characterized. DSP programming is introduced.

Chapters 5 through 13 cover the fundamentals of signal analysis, in particular convolution and the Fast Fourier transform.

Chapters 14 through 21 cover signal filtering in general, and digital filters in detail. This is probably what most of the readers want to use digital signal processing for.

Chapters 23 through 27 cover some specialized aspects of digital signal processing, such compression and image processing. In this section, actual DSP hardware and programming is covered. Coverage is based upon the popular Analog Devices' SHARC processor family

Chapters 30 through 33 get into the more complex mathematical and theoretical aspects of digital signal processing, complex numbers, the complex Fourier transform, Laplace transform, and the z-Transform. As the author puts it, this section is the foundation of theoretical digital signal processing. This section is for people whose field IS digital processing as opposed to people who use digital processing techniques in their applications.

Where to buy
You can purchase this book online from amazon.com

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