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 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.