MATLAB Textbook

[Ian Curtis]

Hi all,

Has anyone ever used either of these MATLAB textbooks? Have you used another one, or is there a good website for MATLAB tutorials?

MATLAB A Practical Introduction

An Engineers Guide to MATLAB

Next year I'm taking a couple of classes that use MATLAB, and there is no introductory MATLAB course. I've done a couple of projects in MATLAB, but they were pretty simple and it was all self taught, so I'm sure I was just scratching the surface.

Thanks!

[Greg Marra]

Depending on your level of experience, "Physical Modeling in MATLAB" may be useful. It was written by Allen Downey, one of my professors at Olin College, as the textbook for our introductory math/physics course, which involves many projects in modeling physical systems in MATLAB. The course is taken by all students, so no programming experience is assumed.

http://www.greenteapress.com/matlab/

The textbook is free as a PDF, and you can buy a paper copy very inexpensively. Maybe it will help!

[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.

Matlab (and most of the other products from The Mathworks) has been my main tool for getting my job done at work for the past 10 years. If you need any help in a specific area in the future, I'd be happy to try my best to help you out.

[Ian Curtis]

Greg,

"Olin textbook" and "free" are words that I like to hear in the same sentence! It certainly looks like a great place to start.

Chris,

Thanks for the offer! My programming experience is also largely self taught, so we'll see how I get by.

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by iCurtis

Greg,

"Olin textbook" and "free" are words that I like to hear in the same sentence! It certainly looks like a great place to start.

Chris,

Thanks for the offer! My programming experience is also largely self taught, so we'll see how I get by.

Allen Downey is straight up redonkulous with respect to copy-left/open source. He can honestly claim that he "learned Python by reading the book he wrote". He wrote a java book and open sourced it. Someone downloaded it, rewrote it for Python and sent it back to him. He read it, and learned Python in doing so. Emulating this is high on my list of "Accomplishments that qualify as winning at life", right next to "get interviewed by Terry Gross".


MATLAB is one of my four favorite programming languages, I used it a lot at DEKA. However, I still get snagged on some of its vector/matrix syntax. So, my advice to a MATLAB newbie is to study that part a little harder than the rest, and to not get too frustrated. If it doesn't work, add more periods before operators.

[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.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Dmentor

... knowing C well can be helpful but to me the minor syntax differences with MATLAB are also very annoying.

This is very true. My originally typed posted started listing some of the differences, but I decided to omit that part.

I remember having those frustrations when I first really started using Matlab. I relived that when I first started using LabVIEW: it was close enough to Simulink that I would try things that I would do in Simulink but it didn't work that way in LabVIEW, and that caused some frustration. I guess when things are really close to each other you tend to skip the documentation and just try to do it how it would make sense given the pattern up to that point. That's where the nice online documentation comes in handy.

Anyway, certain things in Matlab are very C-like, such as low-level file reading and writing, which are almost identical to how you do it in C. In fact, you'll find a lot of things where the people at the Mathworks just kept it as C-like as possible.


Other things that are different but can be annoying if you really know C:

- All Matlab arrays use matrix notation. That means the first index is 1 (NOT 0!!!!!)
- Operations can be performed on arrays/matricies and they follow the rules of matrix algebra, so be careful. You can always force element-wise operation by preceding your operator with a period. For example: a = b .* c;
- operating on subsets of arrays/matricies can be tricky (Be prepared to pull your hair out with some "arrays aren't the same size" errors). Get to know the array range operator (Ex: Array(1:10) means to use elements 1 through 10 of the array.) One cool thing is Array(5:end) automatically goes to the end (no need to know how many elements there are).
- if/elseif/else uses a slightly unique syntax. Very close to C, but not quite.
- There are no {} for code blocks. All loops and if constructs end with the "end" statement
- for loop syntax is for i = startvalue:stepsize:endvalue which is a really nice syntax actually. Stepsize is optional.

There are also some really cool things, like you can have multiple output arguments for a function. No need to pass pointers if you need multiple outputs. Also, all of the built in matrix operations and graphical functions are lifesavers. They are what turn Matlab from a nice novel programming language into the wonderful tool that it is. Not to mention that the debugger is quite good.

Anyway, enjoy learning it. It really is my go-to PC programming language unless I need to do some insanely fast computations.

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

It really is my go-to PC programming language unless I need to do some insanely fast computations.

Excellent post Chris.

MATLAB's superb interactive data manipulation and visualization capabilities make it a natural tool for algorithmic development, modeling and simulation work. MATLAB has constantly evolved and expanded throughout the years and yet most of the scripts I wrote in the early 1990's still run. If you stay in the field of engineering then most likely learning MATLAB well now will provide productivity gains throughout your career. It is sort of like learning to touch type; I've enjoyed the benefits from that for most of my life.

I work a lot with adaptive signal processing of phased sonar arrays which can be very computationally demanding. When we transition a MATLAB algorithm or model that I've written into optimized production code, we will typically write a MEX access function wrapper that calls the production code so that I have access to a high-performance version in MATLAB. This also enables direct comparisons versus the MATLAB model.

[Nikhil Bajaj]

Professor Downey's book looks really good. I learned most of my MATLAB by using the following book, which was prescribed to us in Purdue's Freshman Engineering at the time:

http://www.amazon.com/MATLAB-Introdu...mm_pap_title_2

However, I would suggest Professor Downey's book over it. If you are looking for lots of examples and exercises, Cleve Moler (one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, and perhaps more importantly today the inventor of MATLAB) has two books for that:

http://www.mathworks.com/moler/

Hope that helps.

[chris31]

The first MATLAB book I used at Georgia Tech was this. Its a bit expensive compared to some other books out there. Its an okay book but I cant rate it to much as I didnt really use the book to much as I just learned on my own.