J. F. James

A Student’s Guide to Fourier Transforms is what it says it is. As it is a Student’s Guide, the book is somewhat short and the author tells us that the book is incomplete by design. The book covers Fourier Transforms which are a staple in engineering and physics. It starts out with the idea of Fourier Transforms themselves and continues on throughout, covering the equations necessary to describe them and break down the waveforms.

The book is really interesting. I happen to have the Third Edition, and in it is a program in BASIC to perform an FFT or Fast Fourier Transform. I suppose if you didn’t suck at programming like I do that you could translate it into a more modern language, but at the same time, I imagine that there are now modules or parts of the language that automatically do it in one line of code. It is still interesting to read and understand it though.

The book has applications of the things it teaches and plenty of worked examples. There aren’t really many practice problems, but that is the only thing besides the length of the book that bothered me.… (altro)