This note is concerned with a saturating composite disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC) and H ∞ control for a class of discrete time-delay systems with nonlinearity and disturbances. The disturbances are supposed to include two parts. One in the input channel is generated by an exogenous system with uncertainty, which can represent the harmonic signals with modeling perturbations. The other is supposed to have the bounded H 2 norm, which can represent parametric uncertainties and external disturbance existing in the controlled object. The design approaches of reduced-order disturbance observer are presented for the estimation of the disturbance. By composite control law with saturation, the disturbances can be rejected and attenuated, simultaneously, the desired dynamic performances can be guaranteed for discrete time-delay systems with known and unknown nonlinear dynamics, respectively. Simulation for a flight control system is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared with the previous schemes.