A Digital Signal Processing Primer

What Hacker News says

1. waffletowerNov 2025
   I was surprised to see such a long article on use and miuse of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) with only brief and casual mention of "sidelobes" -- there wasn't formal discussion of the frequency response of the DFT window function and how it relates to transform output. The latter is typically represented evaluating the z-transform of the window function along the unit circle. While steeped in this mathematics the attendant visualizations can be helpful to impart an intuitive understanding of what the DFT is doing with its inputs. While I would recommend a text that covers the topic such as "A Digital Signal Processing Primer" by Ken Steiglitz, Gemini was able to show the response graph of a DFT window function with the following prompt: "what is the z transform of the hamming window in a discrete fourier transform context"
   Show morethread
2. randcrawOct 2018
   I second Lyons. In addition, "Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide" by Steven Smith is also quite approachable -- immersion in calculus not required.

   "A Digital Signal Processing Primer" by Ken Steiglitz is a nice but rigorous intro to the subject. Written by an EE academic, it's more mathematically rigorous than Smith or Lyons.

   Allen Downey's "Think DSP" is also worth a look, though its focus is more conceptual than practical, IMO.

   Show morethread