[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

I've actually never read any books on Matlab other than the documentation that the Mathworks provides. Other than that, I've learned everything through examples and looking at what other people have done.

If you have a solid understanding of C, that will go a long way.

When I first got started using MATLAB nearly 20 years ago, I read through the user's manual and skimmed the reference guide. These days they are all accessible online through the MathWorks website. That's pretty much all you need with judicious use of "help" and "doc". The basic programming constructs are similar to many languages although you need to be cognizant of the various operators and their linear algebra context. As Chris mentioned knowing C well can be helpful but to me the minor syntax differences with MATLAB are also very annoying. If you plan on using MATLAB for any length of time, I would really recommend beefing up your linear algebra particularly if you haven't used it a lot. Generally speaking if you want decent computational performance, you will learn to avoid (or limit) loops. You will then most probably decend into nested layers of reshape(repmat(permute())). Nice and compact but gives my software engineering peers headaches. If you really have to use loops then you can use MEX which is really nice.