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So I am taking a signal processing course in EE and my professor is an Engineer who reallly likes math however his book which we use for the class falls in the dreadfull purgatory of math books in my opinion: too "rigorous" to be intuitive and way too abridged and takes leaps which make it impossible to consider rigorous. It leaves me scratchig my head on the chapter on the relationship between z-transforms, fourier transforms, DTFTs and DFTs. Here are some extracts from the book:

"Comparing $V(z)$ (implicitly meaning the z transform of a sequence say v[n]) with the laplace transform $V_s(s)$ we note that the two transforms are realted by a simple change of variables. In particular letting $z = e^{Ts}$ we have:

$ V(z)|_{z = e^{Ts}} = V(e^{Ts}) = \sum\limits_{n = - \infty }^{\infty}v_c(nT)e^{-nTs} = V_s(s)$ (where $V_s$ is the laplace transform of the ideally sampled function-with --fs = 1/T--$v_c$ which itself has a laplace transform)"

Now this is where he starts loosing me:

We note that the transformation $z = e^{Ts}$ transforms the axis $s = j\omega$ into the unit circle : $z = e^{j\omega t} = e^{j\Omega}$ where $\Omega \triangleq \omega T$

which is the relation between the discrete-time domain angular frequency $\Omega$ in radians and the angular frequency of the continuous-time domain frequency $\omega$ in radians/s. The vertical line $s = \sigma_0 + j\omega$ in the s plane is transformed into a circle $z = e^{\sigma_0 T } e^{jT\omega}$ in the z-plane. In fact a pole at $s = \alpha +j\beta$ is transformed into a pole $z = e^{(\alpha + j\beta)T}$ of radius $r = e^{\alpha T}$ and angle $\Omega = \beta T$ in the z plane.

That last paragraph doesn't mean much to me and I am having a hard time with the following concepts which seem pretty important: