John G. Proakis ?!?

They said it could not be done.. Make men fly that is.... Yet the Wright Brothers did it.

They said it could not be done.. Flying into space that is.... Yet Yuri Gagarin did it.


And before you decide that i have gone rock-craving mad and push that nifty little mouse pointer towards the nifty little X on your screen.. all right, all right, sheesh i am getting to the point already. This review is about Digital Signal Processing by John G. Proakis.

Call me mad.. after all who in their sane minds would write a review on an engineering textbook. Especially if he is not yet gone bald, or married, or underwent a tragedy of both? Or maybe it's just the cobwebs settled on the yellow-cum-violet paperback textbook that drew my attention that day.. or my dad's ever so gentle warning that he is gonna make me beg on the streets. Or it could just be the heavy supper tonite that refuses to settle down in my ample tummy and made me dream up the whole damn thing..

Whatever it may be, one thing is for sure.. the author is gonna do something he wouldn't have imagined doing so in his wildest dreams.. would have laughed his head off if you had told him before. Be it as it may..

On a dreary Wednesday evening(if it ever really did happen and i was wide awake, it occured on 8/11 at 8:30PM IST) , the author stumbled upon a book titled Digital Signal Processing Eastern Economy Edition. Charmed by the magic of the three Es, the author slowly opened the book only to find........................................................................................... what did you expect you moron? the first page of course! Drawn by the sequence of numbers, he turned the page, and lo behold, he found the second page!!! With a beating heart(and wild expectations) the author continued to flip page after page and drew up the following conclusions:

• the book had a sum total of 968 pages(not counting the appendices) of similar nature and structure
• all had a white background and black printing in a language similar to English
• the contents were cryptographically mastered in Greek and Latin semantics, possibly based on a code similar to Da Vinci's
• the page numbers formulated an arithmetic sequence beginning with the number 1 having a seed/increment of 1 as well, and mean 484!

Alas! all this intense research exhausted the author into a state only a triathlon champion can possibly understand. Yet, he was no ordinary mortal. Summoning his Herculean strength, the author was about to explore the magic of the first page(an obscure charm called Preface, possibly a spell to do with making your nose longer or morphing some other facial feature), when his legendary Mom called him down to eat:( With a heavy heart, he lifted that wonderful manuscript and restored it to its rightful place(in the cobwebby corner).

There it still lies.. waiting for the next unsuspecting mortal to enter the hidden depths of ... DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING by John G. Proakis.