Textbook Review: Signal Processing First 1st Edition

 

This book is used as a part of some electrical engineering curriculums for classes such as signals and systems or signal processing. Generally, it gives decent explanations of the introductory material, but it is very light on helpful examples, and thus, the problem sets can be very hard (if your professor assigns them versus making up his or her own problems). It does a bit of the review of the math you should already have been exposed to many times over in the first couple of chapters and then gets into the new material. Several of the exercises in the book are keyed to MATLAB, which some professors use more extensively than others. In terms of doing actual problems, the MATLAB material in the book is probably the most helpful. But, the book does follow the pattern that far too many math, science, and engineering textbooks do, in that they explain and give examples for the very basic material and then have problem sets with material that is much harder and sometimes impossible to figure out based on what you have read. Personally, I think that is fine if you are in a Master's level class as those should prepare you for real-world engineering problems that you have to figure out and will not have the ability to look up. However, at the undergraduate level, when you are learning the introductory concepts, the problem sets should be representative of the explanatory material so that if you have read the chapter text, you should be able to figure out the vast majority of the problems. So, overall, it is not the worst textbook out there, but it could be a lot better.