Disclaimer - I am not familiar with the Cormen book so I m not quite sure what you re looking for.

I m a huge fan of "A Digital Signal Processing Primer" by Ken Steiglitz. It introduces DSP concepts like sampling, as well as simple filtering implementations, without relying just on math for explanation. Cookbook equivalent: You know how to boil water on a stove, but you re nervous about the rest.

A more advanced book, more of a practitioner s handbook than a text, is "Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing" by Lawrence Rabiner and Bernard Gold. Their explanation of the overlap-save FFT technique for convolution, in particular, is the best I ve ever come across. Cookbook equivalent: Maybe Joy of Cooking, maybe the Cordon Bleu tome.

And "Telecommunications Breakdown" by Richard Johnson and William Sethares is great for taking some DSP concepts and bringing them to life by implementing a radio in software. Cookbook equivalent: A tour through a specific cuisine, and explains what "braising" is along the way.

Hope these are of use to you!

For theory, I like Understanding DSP by Rick Lyons, which also has some nice "recipe-type nuggets".

More practical, and much more "nuggetty" is Streamlining DSP, same author. There s some really interesting stuff in there (IMHO!). Some of it is of the "lost knowledge" variety - especially in these days of just running Matlab s filter design functions. Some of it relates to limited hardware machines (which is great for tiny microcontroller or FPGA implementations).

The articles are written by serious, practicing DSP engineers (many of whom hang out on news:comp.dsp) in a very accessible style.

(I m afraid I m no good with cooking analogies though :)

Just for the record and benefit to others, I would recommend The Scientist and Engineer s Guide to Digital Signal Processing.

This is a good book for beginners.

There are a few online books available as well at the great DSPRelated.com:

• INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS by JULIUS O. SMITH
• MATHEMATICS OF THE DISCRETE FOURIER TRANSFORM (DFT) WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS by JULIUS O. SMITH

This is not a book but I m sure it ll be a valuable resource: The Ecole Polythechnique de Lausanne is starting a free online course on digital signal processing on February 18th 2013: https://www.coursera.org/course/dsp.

Also, the guys teaching it co-authored a book on the topic: http://www.sp4comm.org/

A second vote for the Rick Lyons book. You might also want to get a couple of DSP "bibles", e.g. Oppenheim & Schafer and Proakis & Manolakis, which are more theoretical but cover more ground.

The DSP handbook: algorithms, applications and design techniques - Bateman, Andrew, Paterson-Stephens, Iain 2002

and

Introduction to digital signal processing - Meddins, Bob 2000

Have basically made my ADSP module a breeze (so far). They are also at the top of the suggested reading list. As such, both are fairly beginner friendly, and the latter includes Matlab examples.

The former is probably more Delia, while the latter is more my first cook book .

I will also add Vetterli, Kovacevic, and Goya s Foundations of Signal Processing, which can be downloaded for free.