Signals and Systems For Dummies

The topics in this book beg for you to browse through them (for a quick refresh or first time learn), and the way it is organized supports that. The language is natural and clearly understood, which is refreshing for this type of content. There are also excellent supplemental tools and materials. This book is really a great reference that earns a spot on your shelf of necessities.

I have taken many courses related to signals and systems and I have worked in the field for almost 15 years. Dr. Wickert is a theory guy, who has made this subject more accessible to non-theory people. My mind is definitely more sharpened on his whetstone after reading. I did not really "get this" until almost a decade after I started my Undergrad in Electrical Engineering. Most of the experts in this field are in their 40/50s and so there is typically an age gap by how books are written. Not so here. If you can recall even a quarter of the information in this book, you'd impress in a job interview. Looking at the book from a practical perspective, it mentions several software tools I have used previously (Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, Octave) and includes newer open source software such as Maxima and Python (which Dr. Wickert uses in the book). That's where the rubber meets the road and this book is well rounded with frequent code snippets to play with. The price tag makes this a real bargain compared to my equivalent Undergrad textbooks, which were $100.

If Fourier Transforms and Laplace Transforms, Calculus and Differential Equations, are all causing you grief to complete your Engineering, Math or Advanced Physics degree, this book may be of some help. Like most dummies books, I've found that they don't have the best of systems, other than the big print, the text marking, and the use of white space to help you learn the material. Many of these are hardly "Dummies" books at all for the matter. This book certainly is not in the conventional dummy sort of way. Unless you're struggling in your classes at Cal Tech, or MIT, you'd hardly look for a book of this nature as a dummies book. You'd only be a "Dummy" to your local peer group of those high powered students! If you cheated on your SAT's or your dad is on the board of one of those schools and now you're having trouble keeping up, well you might consider this a dummies book in your context. For the rest of us humans, it is far from dumb topics or even that sort of treatment.There is however, some useful material in this for Engineers taking Networks, Communication, Fields, or Engineering Electronics courses. It's not necessarily the focus of the book however, there are much better textbooks out there for that. What this book should have strived for, was a different learning paradigm, one that may have found an acceptable path, to explain all the difficult abstractions, in learning waveforms, and other signal types. How would it do that? I don't know for sure, but here is a section that works at it, but it's only included it as an afterthought. After filling your head for a couple hundred pages with mind numbing equations, graphs, and abstract terminology, They provide a section V (five) consisting of chapters 16 and 17. Chapter 16 details 10 common mistakes to avoid when problem solving. These are all relevant to Systems and Signals specifically, and in their own way are difficult to understand! If your deep in the study of this they may prove very useful. Then Chapter 17 provides 10 properties you can't live without as a systems and signals engineer. These are equally difficult to understand, but they provide a guide for what is important in this field, and what may be focussed on in a college course on the subject.How could these last two chapters have helped with the understanding of the material if they'd been created as a holistic aid to the course? It would take a brilliant author, someone like Isaac Asimov perhaps to integrate those mistake areas, and the properties into a book like this, in a way even the layman may understand, once done, the math could be added, and perhaps more depth. If you're learning this stuff however, you already have a textbook, and a library full of resources, so even without much math, if you understood the way the waveforms were looked at from the perspective, of how they are used in the real world, perhaps taking the course may become easier. AT least the labs would be better. As an Electrical Engineer who as a Senior taught engineering instrument labs to non-EE's, I learned that knowing the material in the book, and the math is only half the battle. Most students EE's or not in electrical did not have a clue on how waves, measurements, and lab equipment are used to look at these mathematical entities. I take great stock in something that can relate abstracts to real world applications. This book is recommended to engineering students, math majors, or physics majors, in a college level program. I further recommend you read the last two chapter's first, two or three times until you feel you're formulating the same questions for each item in your head, then either read your college text, or the first 15 chapters in this book. This book is way too advanced for the casual reader with no interest in math or the sciences.

This is a great overview of signals. I am doing self study for my job and this is a great resource for me. Thorough enough to easily follow along with the examples in the book.

The book is exactly what I was looking for. It is precisely what I and my undergraduate students need. I received the book in perfect conditions and in good timing. Although I have no problem with it being in English, my Signals and Systems students would have preferred it in Spanish.

I still think the text is helpfull. But in my 2 kindles, one with eInk and one being the 8.9 HD, the formulas are very hard to read without zooming - and even after losing time doing it - it keeps too dificult to understand. The problem is that all the formulas are images and not text. And very low resolution images.I believe this is a issue that will not affect the printed version and that will soon be solved (and thankfully updated, hope Amazon is reading this). Until then it makes this book close to useless in ebook format.Once this issue is solved, Ill try to update this critic. Anyway, please check the date (was there time to solve this?) and other reviews before buying the ebook version.Update 1: I did contact Amazon on this issue and they replied allmost instantly that they usually resolve this kind of issues in about 7 days. They also made possible (via a promotion on my account) to buy the printed version without spending much more (wich I had proposed), but I think I will wait the 7 days, for I really like keeping books on kindle. Great costumer support so far. Will raise one star for that.

I bought this to help me brush up on some concepts for a job I was looking into. It was helpful to bolster my understanding to make me feel more confident about my knowledge.

I expected the book to be a well written, easy to understand text. Quite the opposite!

This book was recommended to our signals and systems class by our lecturer, I am very glad that I picked up a copy. Although none of class examples were taken from the book it was very helpful to be able to have a refrence for a different explanation of this rather nitty gritty topic.I'm confident I wouldnt have passed the exam without it. A+

Concepts are clear. Figures produced by python program are helpful for understanding abstract concept and theory! I'll use it as a reference book for my teaching

Aborda los aspectos básicos de un curso de iniciación a señales y sistemas de manera muy clara y sencilla. Es interesante como primer paso para el estudio de teoría de sistemas e Ingeniería de control

Thank you item exactly as described with delivery far exceeding my expectations