Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Understanding Digital Signal Processing - by Richard Lyons

There are a lot of praise on this DSP book, the following is a typical one from Amazon.com:

"We need this Richard Lyons guy in other fields!!"

The last mathematics course I took was Calulus 3 during my senior year in high school... I graduated in 1991. That was my last exposure to mathematics. My undergrad was in biochemistry (no math) and after that I went to medical school (no math). I started my residency in neurology and I became interested in analyzing EEG brain waves. Unfortunately, most work in this field is done in collaboration with engineers, since us docs have minimal knowledge of mathematics and data analysis. I stumbled upon Lyons's book at Borders and decided to give it a shot. Voila!! No more engineers needed!! I now understand sufficiently the concepts of periodic sampling, the Fourier stuff, filters, signal averaging, etc. all the way down to the simple sums of products that they are. Lyons motivated me so much that I picked up Dietel and Dietel's C++ book and now... a month later... I develop my own software to anaylize these EEG signals.

This may not seem as a big deal to the mathematician or engineer... but you have to remember that I'm a neurologist with no math exposure since high school!! If I can learn digital signal processing through Lyons's book... anyone can.

Congratulations, Richard G. Lyons... I wish you would write something on time-series predictions.


I got this book 2 days ago, and just read a few chapters, it is really a wonderful study journey presented by Lyons. In my work, I was exposed to the audio processing area, and I feel I have trouble to understand dsp filters... The hard thing on DSP is the DFT or FFT which contains a lot of math, while I only study it at College that was 13 years ago, another difficulty is English is my second language, I have never use a English math book for study; Third, DSP area and math are different, for example "i" is used in math to express the root of -1, while in DSP it uses "j", (Thanks to Steve Smith's online dsp book tell me the difference)


I enjoy reading some classic books, Lyon's book should be one of them, what the book contains is like a great teacher, not feed you the knowledge, but guide you to understand it, this book acts like this!

Other books on DSP, one is jos, this book is quite fit to my area, but I would not choose it, because I am not in the college to spend that time. The other wonderful online book is by Steve Smith, this book is quite interesting, it choose not to expose the mathematics way, so you will not be overwelmed by the equation. But I still think Lyon's approach is the best, avoid math may be ok, but equation can also be a good role, be clean if you understand it.