| For many years, I have been teaching DSP (Digital Signal Processing) lab courses using various TI (Texas Instruments) DSP platforms. One question I have been getting from students in a consistent way is, “Do we have to know C to take DSP lab courses?” Until last year, my response was, “Yes, C is a prerequisite for taking DSP lab courses.” However, last year for the first time, I provided a different response by saying, “Though preferred, it is not required to know C to take DSP lab courses.” This change in my response came about because I started using LabVIEW to teach students how to design and analyze DSP systems in our DSP courses.
The widely available graphical programming environments such as LabVIEW have now reached the level of maturity that allow students and engineers to design and analyze DSP systems with ease and in a relatively shorter time as compared to C and MATLAB. I have observed that many students taking DSP lab courses, in particular at the undergraduate level, often struggle and spend a fair amount of their time debugging C and MATLAB code instead of placing their efforts into understanding signal processing system design issues. The motivation behind writing this book has thus been to avoid this problem by adopting a graphical programming approach instead of the traditional and commonly used text-based programming approach in DSP lab courses. As a result, this book allows students to put most of their efforts into building DSP systems rather than debugging C code when taking DSP lab courses. |