[sdiy] DSP book recommendation wanted

[Scott Gravenhorst]

I think that not all sets of documentation are equal.  While someone might
recommend Mathworld, that doesn't make it a tutorial.  It is what it is.  There
are enough books out there that somewhere, there's got to be some good ones.

And not all readers are equal either.  It may be that to some, Mathworld is
well organized and an easy learn.  Others might find it a slog through the mud.
We give our suggestions because they worked for the suggester and that's about
as far as I can throw it.

That said, I think your comment about math teachers is salient, at least it 
is to me.  My son has a lot of problems with math and it's no wonder why.  In
middleschool, he got a math teacher who's real desire in life was to be a
lounge act in Vegas.  Then he goes to highschool and gets a math teacher who's
real desire in life is to be a prize fighter and spent more time in class 
flexing than teaching the basics of triangles.  Both of these teachers knew the 
math, but sucked at teaching.  Something's wrong there.  I doubt that unions 
and tenure are helping me here.

But mathematicians may simply have their noses out of joint because of credit
given for great things.  For example, we all recognize the names Hertz and Marconi
as involved in the discovery and implementation of radio communications.  But what
about the math that Maxwell did that laid out what needed to be done and proved 
that it would work?  Marconi seems to take the cigar, Hertz gets a unit of measure, 
but nobody ever credits Maxwell.  I'd bet this happens again and again.  So they 
build their university ivory towers, grow ponytails and beards and look all 
professorial.  They go to class and pontificate theoretical bovine excrement because
they sound so damned smart while they do it.  It's an ego trip for them.

I did, however, have an excellent calculus teacher.  I went to lowly community
college where they couldn't afford the beards and ponytails so they got my prof.
on the cheap.  He taught calculus from an applied math standpoint.  Hmm.  Maybe
the problem is the big universities being a bit too big for their britches...

"David G. Dixon" <dixon at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
>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.
>
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