Book excerpt: With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun. The treatment is therefore less focused on the mathematics and more on the conceptual aspects, the idea being to allow the readers to think about the subject at a higher conceptual level, thus building the foundations for more advanced topics. The book remains an engineering text, with the goal of helping students solve real-world problems. In this vein, the last chapter pulls together the individual topics as discussed throughout the book into an in-depth look at the development of an end-to-end communication system, namely, a modem for communicating digital information over an analog channel.