MATLAB Textbook

[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.