Essentials of Digital Signal Processing

Like the clarity and humor with which this book presents the material.I would put it in the top 10 of best DSP books.DR. Lathi is an excellent writer and I have his other books which are model of good engineering writing.Charan Langton

Since my undergraduate days more than 40 years ago, I have been a fan of Professor Lathi's books. In general they cannot be beat for clarity, lucid explanations, and solid example problems. For these reasons they are excellent for reference and self-study. Unfortunately, this book falls somewhat short when compared to his others. First, there are some inconsistencies of some definitions from earlier books to this one. For example in 'Signal Processing & Linear Systems' the Sinc function is defined as Sin(x)/x, here it is defined as Sin(Pi x)/(Pi x). Both are legitimate definitions just not consistent from one book to the other. My other major gripe is that there is no answer key to the example problems at the back of each chapter. There are for the Drill problems but these are sparse. For those who use a book for self-study problem answers are critical for complete understanding of the material. Answer keys are usually only available for course instructors. The usual answer for this is that instructors need the answers so that they can use them for homework or exam problems. Any instructor who cannot make up their own test problems should look for another line of work. One star off for the issue of definitions and one star for lack of an answer key.

Ok this book is very good in terms of explanations, giving additional insight to concepts, and linking the relation between continuous and discrete time signals. However I have some issues with how some chapters and sections are organized. For example, it would make more sense to have the z transform introduced before the discrete Fourier transform. Also it would make more logical sense to group the discussion of the properties of the z transform with the introduction of the z transform and not after the section on the inverse z-transform. Additionally, it lacks detailed procedure or method of how to determine the coefficients of the PDF and rather simply states the techniques to use or get the results from mat lab. Also it doesn't mention the importance of poles or zeros when considering the z-transform. To get to the point, chapter 7 must be redone to provide better understanding and significance of the z-transform.

I absolutely loved learning from this book. The topics covered are thoroughly explained with vivid examples and practice problems. The MATLAB integration makes learning DSP very exciting and applicable! My DSP course was one of my favorites because of this book. I would highly recommend it!

good content