DSP Book Review
by William E. Gates (Editor)
Midnight Engineering, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall, 1998, page 33.
Reprinted with permission

Digital Signal Processing and the Microcontroller, by Dale Grover and John (Jack) R. Deller, is like a breath of fresh air compared with most of the technical books that are sent to me for review.  Longtime readers of Midnight Engineering will remember Dale Grover from the articles he contributed several years ago.  With his co-author, Dale has put together a "story" of DSP that pulls the reader in.  I was sanguine as I unwrapped the book from its packaging, but as I thumbed through it I saw a different kind of text.  As the authors state in their Preface:
In this book, we hope to reach a compromise between theory and practice.  Our goal is that you will be able to use digital filtering and other DSP techniques in your future microcontroller applications.  However, good engineering requires a firm grasp of the underlying theory, especially in the field of DSP.  Without this knowledge, you're skating on thin ice!  We're going to take a decidedly less mathematical, more intuitive approach to the theory of DSP, one that we hope won't elicit too many yawns or sudden "nap attack."  On the way, we'll try to give you the big picture of how DSP is profoundly changing the face of electronics and, in fact, the world.  This is probably not the only DSP book you'll ever need, but we hope you will find it useful as a gentle introduction to DSP.  I found it to be exactly that.
What pulled me into reading this DSP book was the obvious respect the authors have for the analog world.  Chapter 2, Analog Signals and Systems, plus Chapter 3, Analog Filters, made for a very pleasant review of how the "real" world works before diving into the synthesized digital world.  I also found the relevant review of trig, complex numbers, and transforms in an appendix to be helpful.  Also in an appendix is a quick review of basic AC and DC electronics.
Running throughout the book is a cartoon series wherein an eccentric guru leads a couple of young engineers through the intricacies of FIR and IIR filters and beyond.  This is a fun and interesting book on DSP.  In fact, other authors should look to this model for their writing style on otherwise dry topics that often end of (sic) being more math than most of us care to embrace.  (Prentice Hall, ISBN:  0-13-081348-6, w/CD-ROM)
WEG