I have started work on a second edition of Think DSP! You can see the current draft here.

I started this project in part because of this announcement:

Once in a while, a few of the Scicloj friends will meet to learn about signal processing, following the Think DSP book by Allen B. Downey, and implementing things in Clojure. Our notes will be published at Clojure Civitas.

If you know some Clojure and you want to learn DSP, click here to learn more.

The other reason I started the project is that Cursor (the AI-assisted IDE) helped get me unstuck. Here’s the problem: Think DSP was the last book I wrote in LaTeX before I switched to Jupyter notebooks. So I had code in Python modules and the text in LaTeX.

At some point I put the code in notebooks, with exercises and solutions in other notebooks. Some time later I converted the LaTeX to notebooks — but those notebooks only had code snippets, not the complete working code. And they were full of leftover LaTeX bits, like references to the figures, which were in all the wrong places.

Merging the text, code, and exercises into a single notebook was too daunting, so the book was idle for a while. And that’s where Cursor came in.

I drafted a plan to convert the notebooks to Markdown (using Jupytext) and then use AI tools to merge them. After I merged the first chapter, I checked it for issues and revised the prompt. After a few iterations, I had a plan document and a prompt document that worked pretty well. Cursor took a few minutes to merge the notebooks for each chapter, but the results were good.

I made a second pass to make the structure of the notebooks consistent. For example, each notebook starts with five or six cells that import libraries, download files, etc. It’s helpful if these cells are the same, and with the same tags, in every notebook. Revising the Markdown version of the notebooks and then converting to ipynb worked well.

The whole process took about 1.5 work days — and there are probably still some issues I’ll have to fix by hand — but it is nice to get the project unstuck!