A well done book on General DSP by Richard Tervo

One can get a pretty good feeling about a book by just flipping a few pages. And this book passed the flip test immediately!

First of all, I want to say that I love this book and the way the material is presented, from simplest to the complete and comprehensive. It covers the usual course material of a fist DSP/signal processing class.  The first chapter starts with looking at common signals, such sinusoids, exponentials etc. but presents then not just by an equation by many graphs and pictures with emphasis on visual understanding.  Matlab code that produced these figures is included and teaches these in a way to help the student to further their signal manipulation skills. Then end of chapter exercises are concise and actually helpful and not an IQ test.  What is remarkable about this book is that it often includes examples of a real life process of how a signal might have been created, such as it does for the half-wave rectifier giving a circuit realization. This book does continually through all chapters and is unique for DSP book.  In the linear systems chapter, the author goes much further than most in helping through graphs, the understanding of convolution. There are probably 20 pages on convolution a subject which because of ridiculous simplicity so confuses all of us.

The Authors then cover the Fourier series, giving once again examples such as the 60 Hz powerline, the CB Radio booster, and other amplifiers are examples of how Fourier analysis is applied. I am myself writing a book on Fourier transform so I was pleased that they have an approach similar to mine in not confusing but making the topic crystal clear.

The Laplace Transform is made clear with several examples and end of chapter examples are actually help bring the essence home.  I could go on and on for each chapter. The quality never varies and remains high, all topics are covered well.  The last chapter on communications brings the applications of the fundamental concepts all in one place and is an excellent summary.

Excellent textbook or a brush up on concepts for a working engineer.

Practical Signal Theory with Matlab Applications, Richard J. Tervo,  John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2014

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I received this book from the publisher for review. I don’t receive that many and this one is actually the first.