This best-selling, hands-on, multimedia package provides an introduction to fundamental concepts, specifically discrete-time systems, for beginning engineering students. Created and written by the same well-respected authors, it has been adopted in over 100 institutions worldwide since publication. This class-tested learning package is also widely used as a self-teaching tool to discover more about USP applications, multimedia signals, and MATLAB reg; . Unique features such as visual learning demonstrations, MATLAB laboratories, and a bank of solved homework problems are just a few of the things that make this an essential learning tool for mastering fundamental concepts in today's electrical and computer engineering curricula.

This book and its accompanying CD-ROM are the result of almost 10 years of work that originated from, and was guided by, the premise that signal processing is the best starting point for the study of both electrical engineering and computer engineering. In the summer of 1993, two of us (J. H. McC and R. W. S) began to develop a one-quarter course that was to become the first course for Georgia Tech computer engineering students, who were at that time following an overlapping, but separate, curriculum track from the electrical engineering students in the School of ECE. We argued that the subject of digital signal processing (DSP) had everything we wanted in a first course for computer engineers: it introduced the students to the use of mathematics as a language for thinking about engineering problems; it laid useful groundwork for subsequent courses; it made a strong connection to digital computation as a means for implementing systems; and it offered the possibility of interesting applications to motivate beginning engineers to do the hard work of connecting mathematics and computation to problem solving. We were not the first to have this idea. In particular, two books by Professor Ken Steiglitz of Princeton University had a major impact on our thinking. The major reasons that it was feasible in 1993 to experiment with what came to be known at Georgia Tech as the "DSP First" approach were: (1) the easy accessibility of increasingly powerful personal computers and (2) the availability of MATLAB, a powerful and easy-to-use software environment for numerical computation. Indeed, Steiglitz's 1972 book was well ahead of its time, since DSP had few practical applications, and even simple simulations on then-available batch processing computers required significant programming effort. By the early 1990s, however, DSP applications such as CD audio, high-speed modems, and cell phones were widespread due to the availability of lowcost "DSP chips" that could perform extensive computation in "real time:" Thus, integrated circuit technology was the driving force that simultaneously provided the wherewithal both for a convenient PC-based laboratory experience for learning DSP and for creating a climate of applications that provided motivation for that study. From the beginning, we believed that "hands-on" experience with real signals was crucial. This is provided by a "laboratory" based on MATLAB running on PCs. In the laboratory assignments, students gain direct reinforcement from hearing and seeing the effects of filtering operations that they have implemented on sound and image signals. They synthesize music from sinusoids, and they see that those same sinusoids are the basis for the data modems that they use routinely to access the Internet. We also found that MATLAB made it possible to quickly develop demonstration programs for visualizing and clarifying complicated mathematical concepts. By 1995, we had written notes covering the topics in our course, and we had amassed a large amount of computer-based supporting material. Mark Yoder, while on sabbatical leave from Rose-Hulman, had the idea to put all of this material in a form that other teachers (and students) could access easily. That idea led to a CDROM that captured the entire contents of our course web site. It included demonstrations and animations used in classes, laboratory assignments, and solved homework problems. As teachers, this material has changed the way we present ideas, because it offers new ways to visualize a concept "beyond the equations:" Over the years, our web site has continued to grow. We anticipate that this growth will continue, and that users of this material will see new ideas take shape in the form of additional demos and labs. In 1998, all of this material was packaged together in a textbook/CD-ROM, and we gave it the descriptive titleDSP First: A Multimedia Approach. No sooner had we finished DSP First, then Georgia Tech s