Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems

This book provides an accessible introduction to signals and systems for electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students, and is based on several years of successful classroom use at the University of California, Berkeley. The material starts with an early introduction to applications, well before students have built up enough theory to fully analyze the applications. This motivates students to learn the theory and allows students to master signals and systems at the sophomore level. The material motivates signals and systems through sound and images, as opposed to circuits, and as such calculus is the only prerequisite.

The book is accompanied by a robust website with detailed notes and illustrative applets for most every topic. These applets include interactive manipulation of sound and images, making the material dynamic and understandable to all students. The book also contains extensive lab material. This lab material is based on Matlab and Simulink, and helps students build a bridge between the "what is" aspects of signals and systems as taught in the text, and the "how to" aspects of signals and systems as used in the real world.

Edward A. Lee is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is the Director of the Ptolemy project. He is the co-author of four books and numerous papers. His bachelor's degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (1986). From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a fellow of the IEEE, was a NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.

Pravin Varaiya is the James Fife Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of Califonia PATH, a multi-university program of research in Intelligent Transportation Systems. From 1975 to 1992 he also was Professor of Economics at Berkeley. He has taught at MIT and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories during 1962-63. Dr. Varaiya has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Miller Research Professorship. He is a Fellow of IEEE. His areas of research are communication networks, transportation systems, and electric power systems. He has published more than 200 papers in technical journals. He is on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part C; Discrete Event Dynamical Systems: Theory and Applications; Journal of Economic Dynamics &Control; Birkhauser series on Progress in Systems and Control Theory.