Signals and systems. Fundamentals (Q2260487)

This book is intended as an introduction to theory and applications of signal processing. As written on the back cover, it is ``designed for undergraduate students majoring in electrical engineering, electronics and information science'' and -- as the authors note in the preface -- is intended as a guideline for a one-semester-course. The treatment of the subject is complete. It deals with continuous and sampled signals, addresses all important topics related to Fourier representation and introduces standard transforms like the Laplace- and the z-transform together with their use in describing continuous and discrete LTI-systems, respectively. A short note concerning compressed sensing and \(k\)-sparsity provides a flavour of this research topic. The book concludes with direct-form and state space representations of LTI-systems. I personally like the very clear introduction of discrete convolutions via expanding signals with respect to their natural basis and introducing the fundamental concept of the impulse response. As seen from this catalogue, the material covered on 250 pages is rather exhaustive and it is obvious that the intention of the book mentioned above can be reached only by stringently focusing the subjects and using a strict notation. In this respect, the book could be slightly improved. To give a simple example, when converting cartesian representations of complex quantities to their exponential form it is important to discriminate \(\arctan(y/x)\) (together with a proper separation of the cases \(x>0\) and \(x<0\)) from \(atan(x,y)\), which usually already accounts for this separation. The book uses both symbols without clearly defining them, which is probably confusing for the student reader. Also in my opinion it would be helpful, to illustrate, when appropriate, geometric ideas behind formulae. As an example, Fourier coefficients are derived computing orthogonal projections of signals with respect to linear spans of basis functions. If this fact had been illustrated properly, the reader could develop a better understanding of the rather formal calculations leading to the final formulae. Also quite subtle objects of distribution theory like ``impulse trains'' and the Poisson summation formula are derived in a rather heuristic manner and it will be hard for an undergraduate engineering student to really feel safe on these issues. Nevertheless all in all students and lecturers can profit from a large stock of worked out examples, many of them borrowed from electrical engineering. The book also contains many problems strengthening computational skills and for a future edition I would recommend to include solutions -- at least for a representative subset of these problems. Further it would be helpful to include in a subsequent edition references to and examples from standard software packages like MATLAB or free alternatives (e.g., SciLab or Octave). Suggested further reading: [\textit{F. P. León} et al., Signale und Systeme. 5th revised ed. München: Oldenbourg Verlag (2011; Zbl 1330.94002)], [\textit{S. B. Damelin} and \textit{W. Miller jun.}, The mathematics of signal processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2012; Zbl 1257.94001)].