The fact that this book is written in plain language is great, it makes a lot of concepts a lot easier to digest. However, the material here is extremely patchy. As a student learning this for the first time, I've found that this textbook isn't exactly the most effective due to the holes between content areas. The author seems to go into detail about things that seem unimportant, while he/she skims over the real meat of the subject. And what's worse is the fact that there are no worked out examples. If there were more worked examples, concepts might click amongst the patchy conceptual explanations. There is MATLAB scattered throughout the text, which I've found useful at times, but it too is not explained well-enough. All in all, this is not a text that I recommend to those in their introductory signal processing courses, rather, I recommend this text to those who have already taken introductory signal processing classes and are in need of a review text. As a review for those already in the know, this text seems great.