[sdiy] DSP book recommendation wanted

[David G. Dixon]

This is come as a shock to many here, but...  I actually agree
wholeheartedly with cheater cheater on this issue!  Having looked at the
offending reference myself, that is the last place I would send anyone
seeking to learn about integrals.  The first sentence started out OK, more
or less ("an integral is a generalization of the concept of area") but it
quickly degenerated.  It bore all the hallmarks of having been written by
someone who was desperately trying to prove how smart he is, rather than
actually trying to help anybody understand integrals.

In my professional capacity as a university professor, I've often said that
I could teach engineers all the math they need to know in an intensive
weekend short course (OK, may one week).  The problem with engineers
learning math is that they are typically expected to do so at the feet of
mathematics professors who, notwithstanding the many fine qualities I'm sure
many of them do possess, seem as a group to be spectacularly incapable of
actually teaching math.


> Yet another point is that often the definitions in Mathworld just have
> way to much in them. For example, imagine I don't know what an
> integral is, and I want to learn about it as I would learn from a
> reference book. I would go here:
> 
> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Integral.html
> 
> Now I would have not only been confused by this, since my teacher told
> me to read about integrals, not 'Riemann integrals', but I'll have
> also been indoctrinated by 1988 'New Math' quotes, and will have
> learned nothing.
> 
> Now let's read on. In a few short lines, they jump from (5) which is
> usually the first formula that you see in a course on integrals right
> into (8) which assumes the reader will have started multivariate
> calculus. This is almost never the case when learning about integrals.
> 
> Oh, should I learn the identities too? Let's look at 11-16... that
> might be on the exam - oh boy - better learn em. Put some more garbage
> in my head that I won't use in the next 3 years or so.