The Authors
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Ronald Schafer
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Ron Schafer: For the past ten years I have been working with Jim McClellan and Mark Yoder to bring about a change in the way we teach signals and systems at Georgia Tech and Rose-Hulman (and I hope at other schools too). I have been teaching and writing about digital signal processing for almost thirty years. During much of that time, DSP was an advanced undergraduate and graduate subject. It has been great fun attempting to make the subject accessible and stimulating for sophomore computer engineering students, and by all indications, I think we have had considerable success. Our first book entitled, DSP First: A Multimedia Approach, published in 1998, was written for a one quarter course at Georgia Tech. Our idea was that the subject of DSP had everything we wanted in a first course for computer engineers: it introduced the students to the use of mathematics in engineering; it laid the groundwork for subsequent courses (including linear circuits); it made a strong connection to digital computation; and it offered the possibility of interesting applications to motivate the hard work of connecting mathematics and computation. This meant that our computer engineering students would not see electric circuits as their introduction to ECE. In retrospect, it doesn't seem to be such a radical idea, since digital signal processing is arguably as fundamental to computer engineering as is electric circuits. Now, after almost ten years experience, I am convinced that the advantages of teaching DSP first are significant for electrical engineers as well as for computer engineers. Furthermore, the subject has increasing relevance to other technical disciplines such as computer science, which is turning increasingly to applications of computers involving multimedia information, and to other branches of engineering, where DSP techniques are being used routinely to collect and massage data of many types. No sooner had we finished DSP First, than Georgia Tech switched from a quarter system to semesters, and our course became "Signal Processing First", the first course for both computer engineers and electrical engineers. However, we were left with a textbook that only covered two-thirds of the material that we needed to include for the semester-long course. This led to another four years of development that included four new chapters, many new laboratory assignments, many new demos and visualizations, hundreds of new homework problems and solutions, and up dates of many of our original computer demos. This CD-ROM contains all of that material. It represents an untold amount of work by the three authors and many students and colleagues. We have already seen the return on our investment in our own classes and those of other teachers who used DSP First, and I am sure that the new materials will be used in many ways that we have not anticipated. I am looking forward to hearing from users about what works and what doesn't work for them.
