Why is DSP considered the hardest subject to study at school?
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From: HardySpicer on 8 Jul 2010 17:07 On Jul 9, 7:55 am, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <n...(a)12000.org> wrote: > I find DSP the hardest subject to become good at. Other students like me > at school also complain how hard the DSP courses are compared to the > other EE courses and other engineering courses in general. > > I think some of the reasons are: > > 1. DSP courses Has the most math. (including complex variables). > 2. Two domains to worry about, time and frequency. Jumping from one to > the other can get confusing. > 3. Two other domains to worry about, continuous time vs. discrete time. > 4. Many relations between many concepts to get right. > 5. One has to also be good in programming. > 6. Demodulation is just hard. Filter design is hard. > 7. Need to also be good in probability and statistics to do random > signals (real life). > 8. Has to know how to do lab work also. Hard stuff. > > And many more. May be you can add more items to the list. > > Do many of the DSP experts here also found DSP hard at school? It seems > only the very smart can become good at DSP. > > I think one is either born to do DSP or not. I think it is genetics. > > --Nasser ahhh diddums...you should try some advanced control engineering and see how you get on. No sympathy. Hardy
From: Vladimir Vassilevsky on 8 Jul 2010 17:12 Nasser M. Abbasi wrote: > > I find DSP the hardest subject to become good at. If you know any subject easy to become good at, let me know. VLV
From: Dirk Bell on 8 Jul 2010 17:13 On Jul 8, 3:55 pm, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <n...(a)12000.org> wrote: > I find DSP the hardest subject to become good at. Other students like me > at school also complain how hard the DSP courses are compared to the > other EE courses and other engineering courses in general. > > I think some of the reasons are: > > 1. DSP courses Has the most math. (including complex variables). > 2. Two domains to worry about, time and frequency. Jumping from one to > the other can get confusing. > 3. Two other domains to worry about, continuous time vs. discrete time. > 4. Many relations between many concepts to get right. > 5. One has to also be good in programming. > 6. Demodulation is just hard. Filter design is hard. > 7. Need to also be good in probability and statistics to do random > signals (real life). > 8. Has to know how to do lab work also. Hard stuff. > > And many more. May be you can add more items to the list. > > Do many of the DSP experts here also found DSP hard at school? It seems > only the very smart can become good at DSP. > > I think one is either born to do DSP or not. I think it is genetics. > > --Nasser When I went to school (1980), although DSP was taught in the EE school, the EE's found it harder than the physics and math people. I can't say who did better at the actual application after graduation. I think the difficulty is related to background, not genetics. Dirk
From: Nasser M. Abbasi on 8 Jul 2010 17:26 On 7/8/2010 2:07 PM, HardySpicer wrote: > ahhh diddums...you should try some advanced control engineering and > see how you get on. > No sympathy. > > Hardy But DSP and control in a way are interrelated? A filter is just a system. IIR has feedback. Feedback is used in DSP. Using Costas loop (phase-locked loop) in demodulation sues feedback loop to detect carrier frequency, and I am sure there many other examples. Matlab uses state space approach in converting analog filter to digital filter. Modern control theory is all state space. For me, control/ linear system theory/ signal processing are all very much interrelated. Advanced control theory goes a little more crazy with advanced math and matrix theory than DSP, but at the end of the day, it is all just a system, with input/output and feedback and fancy disturbances thrown in to make it real. I love to study control theory also, and I also found it very hard. I think control engineers and DSP engineers have the same genetics. --Nasser
From: Al Clark on 8 Jul 2010 18:08
"Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma(a)12000.org> wrote in news:i15afd$dds$1 @speranza.aioe.org: > > I find DSP the hardest subject to become good at. Other students like me > at school also complain how hard the DSP courses are compared to the > other EE courses and other engineering courses in general. > > I think some of the reasons are: > > 1. DSP courses Has the most math. (including complex variables). > 2. Two domains to worry about, time and frequency. Jumping from one to > the other can get confusing. > 3. Two other domains to worry about, continuous time vs. discrete time. > 4. Many relations between many concepts to get right. > 5. One has to also be good in programming. > 6. Demodulation is just hard. Filter design is hard. > 7. Need to also be good in probability and statistics to do random > signals (real life). > 8. Has to know how to do lab work also. Hard stuff. > > And many more. May be you can add more items to the list. > > Do many of the DSP experts here also found DSP hard at school? It seems > only the very smart can become good at DSP. > > I think one is either born to do DSP or not. I think it is genetics. > > --Nasser > > > > I always thought that "fields" was the hardest EE course. I only had one DSP course and it was horrible. This was due more to the reference (Stanley) and perhaps the era (1970s). At the same time, it wasn't really hard to do the math, it was hard to see the relevance (there were no DSP chips, yet) I started out as an analog signal processing engineer. When I started to practice DSP, I found things to be more the same than different. If you can solve problkems in the s domain you can solve them in the z domain. The biggest problem with many of the college texts is that they often do a poor job of connecting the math to actual applications. I learned more DSP from a few of the manufacturer's books than many of the more academic college books. The manufacture's books were more like "Here is the theory and here is the specific code that implements it" This let me connect the dots. I got much more out of the more theoretical texts after I learned basics from the other sources. This is why Lyons, Frerking and other books are so popular. O&S is all math without enough "Why do I care?" Al Clark www.danvillesignal.com |