[sdiy] DSP book recommendation wanted

[Alex Iles]

> The trick is knowing when to look away from the integrals & summations
> that the academics are always throwing around.

chuckle...

Back in the '80s, when I was working on pattern recognition and image
analysis I always convolved the image with a 3x3 matrix of 0s with -1s on
the diagonal to enhance the edges; it was a well known and standard
process for edge detection.  I kind of understood the mathematical
(Fourier) concepts, but I was much more interested in the syntactic
pattern recognition.  One day I spotted a paper in the IEEE Pattern
Recognition and Machine Intelligence journal that presented a "new edge
detection algorithm."  So, I muddled through it with all of its custom
symbology and the like.  After a couple days of confusion, I finally
determined that they were convolving the image with a 3x3 matrix of 0s
with -1s on the diagonal.  The authors had buried this simple concept in
so much mud that their paper made it past the IEEE referees as "new."
Ever since then, I've had reduced respect (although still pretty high) for
science that I can't grasp on at least some level...