Streamlining Digital Signal Processing: A Tricks of the Trade Guidebook [Paperback]

I wouldn't advise that students of digital signal processing buy this book. It is a well-written and unique tool for the professional, but it will likely not be useful for students unless you are working on some specialized project or Ph.D. and need advanced and specialized help. The tips are well-written, thorough, and well-illustrated. Part one, on efficient digital signal filtering, will be helpful for anyone from novice to professional. The rest of the book, however, deals with specific and complex topics. Quite frankly, Lyon's excellent book "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" includes most of the tips and tricks in part one and is aimed at the novice at an affordable cost. That book is a much better choice for students. I was looking for discussions on implementation of the arctangent function - don't ask me why - and this was the only book that had an accessible section on the subject. It is THAT kind of book. Have your copy of Oppenheim & Schafer's "Discrete-time Signal Processing" handy, though, because in explaining the details of some of these more difficult subjects the background material had to sacrificed for the sake of producing a compact volume that flows well. Highly recommended for the right audience.

This is the book's Editor, Richard Lyons. I was happy to read the positive Customer Reviews of this book, and I thank the reviewers for taking the time to post their comments. However, I'd like to respond to one reviewer's comment that, "Half a (sic) material is repition (sic) from Lyons other title." That comment is likely to mislead many readers.
In reality only four of this book's 28 chapters cover DSP topics comparable to the material I discuss in my earlier "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" book. While I am one of the book's contributors, there are 29 other engineers who contributed their own DSP material to this unique book.

To describe the content of the book, below I repeat the book's Preface.
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PREFACE:

This book presents recent advances in digital signal processing (DSP) to simplify, or increase the computational speed of, common signal processing operations. The topics here comprise clever DSP "tricks of the trade" not covered in traditional DSP textbooks. This material is practical, real-world, DSP tips and tricks as opposed to the traditional highly-specialized, math-intensive, research subjects directed at industry researchers and university professors. Here we go beyond the standard DSP fundamentals textbook and present new, but tried-n-true, clever implementations of digital filter design, spectrum analysis, signal generation, high-speed function approximation, and various other DSP functions.
With this book we wished to create a resource that is relevant to the needs of the working DSP engineer by helping bridge the theory-to-practice gap between introductory DSP textbooks and the esoteric, difficult to understand, academic journals. The goal of this book is to make the practicing-DSP engineer reader say, "Wow that's pretty neat--I have to remember this, maybe I can use it sometime." While this book will be useful to experienced DSP engineers, due to its gentle tutorial style it will also be of considerable value to the DSP beginner.
The mathematics used herein is simple algebra and the arithmetic of complex numbers, making this material accessible to a wide engineering and scientific audience. In addition, each chapter contains a Reference List for those readers wishing to learn more about a given DSP topic. Fortunately, the chapter topics in this book are written in a standalone manner, so the subject matter can be read in any desired order.
The contributors to this book make up a dream team of experienced DSP engineer-authors. They are not only knowledgeable in signal processing theory, they are "make it work" engineers who build working DSP systems. (They actually know which end of the soldering iron is hot.) However, unlike many authors whose writing seems to say, "I understand this topic and I defy you to understand it", our contributors go all-out to convey as much DSP understanding as possible. As such the chapters of this book are postcards from our skilled contributors on their endless quest for signal processing's Holy Grail: accurate processing results at the price of a bare minimum of computations.
We welcome you to this DSP tricks of the trade guidebook. The Editor and the IEEE Press hope you find it valuable.
Richard G, Lyons
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I beg your tolerance for my assigning '5 stars' to my comment here. I did so because I'm convinced this book is an distinctively-useful addition to the literature of DSP.

As a DSP (digital signal processing) practioneer for over 4 decades, I give this book my highest praise. It's an extensive "how-to-do-it" compilation of tips and tricks that lead to efficient processor design. The presentations are lucid and the DSP configurations are well proven and established. This book is a ready reference and is absolutely indispensible to anybody who works in DSP.

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