Hacker News Books

Blanchard, Devaney and Hall, "Differential Equations". The first math textbook I found that you can actually read.

Oppenheim, Willsky, and Nawab, "Signals and Systems". The foundational modern text for signals processing; Fourier analysis becomes a fundamental way of thinking.

Electrical engineer turned software engineer, here.

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill has a permanent place on my desk. It is quite simply the bible of electronics engineering, the EE analogue of the famed Machinery’s Handbook.

I also recommend Signals and Systems by Oppenheim for any aspiring EE.

I've just spent a while looking for my old signal processing textbooks, but there was too much piled on top of them (I've moved house three times since I last worked with signal processing... :)

I remember two introductory books which were quite good - Kamen/Heck's 'Signals and Systems' - tells you a bit about the tools of the trade, laplace and fourier transforms, transfer functions, filter design &c - the book was accompanied by a number of MatLab scripts which let you visualise how manipulating properties of a filter affected the output; most useful.

Proakis & Manolakis' Digital Signal Processing was also quite good; both books assume you know your way around engineering mathematics - series, integrals mostly - but in particular Kamen/Heck I remember provoking quite a number of insights from the text alone.

Again, the ARRL may be of some assistance - the radio amateur's handbook has a couple of chapters on the basics of filters, leaning very much against the applied end of things.

I hear good things about Owen's Practical Signal Processing, too, but haven't studied it myself yet; as you say, there's only so much time in a day...

Oh, and steer clear of anything with the phrase 'non-linear' anywhere in the title or blurb. Just don't go there.

I am reading way too many books at once. Not in danger of finishing them all, but in the last month I have read from:

  Technical:

Armstrong, Programming Erlang

Oppenheim et al, Signals and Systems

Abelson and Sussman, SICP

The Fourier Transform and its Applications

Project Management for Construction

  Nontechnical:

Russel, History of Western Philosophy

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Schelling, Strategy of Conflict

The US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Araki Photofile

...

All of them are too interesting.