I avoided learning DSP for a long time. It was something arcane which Real Engineers understood. This book helped me get over that.

The first thing you notice about Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists is the code listings: They're all in BASIC! All the abstraction is stripped away and how digital signal processing operates is laid bare.

The other great thing about this book is the breadth of applications: Audio ones like compression and speech recognition (naturally) but also photography, radar, seismology and so on. Reading about a problem and how technology is applied to it dumps dopamine into my brain.