I first read Smith's "The #Scientist and #Engineer's Guide to #DSP" in the late 1990s, when it was published. I was ambivalent about its efficacy, especially considering that the title includes "engineer" but the pages contain almost no maths. I mean, just compare this book to Oppenheim's 1975 classic, "Digital Signal Processing", which I used to study DSP. Indeed, why compare at all.
But some years later, I loaned my copy of Smith's book to a #CS friend of mine who was trying to enter DSP through the programmer's doorway. And this book helped him a great deal, especially because it contains complete implementations of various algorithms—in BASIC.
It seems the traditional order of presentation of DSP, like introducing the \(z\)-domain in the first chapter as #EE textbooks do habitually, can be counterproductive to non-EE readers. That's probably why Smith introduces this topic in the final chapter.
Perspectives....