Customer Reviews

An Engineer's Guide to Matlab

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excellent! ... Applied Engineering using computers, it doesn't get any better than this. Examples, programs, applications .. this is where this book beats the competition. Matlab is a powerful program, and this book shows why. It has been written for beginners and experienced users alike. Introduction to matrices, then goes into functions, and 2D/3D plotting ... then the fun begins with Engineering Applications in fields such as Machine Design, Vibrations, Control Systems, Dynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer and even Statistics and Optimization! Numerous programs and examples serve as practice for the reader. I am currently using the text to write programs for calculating the vibration of thin beams in my Grad Vibrations class. I only wish I could have gotten my hands on a book such as this when I took many of my undergrad courses. By the way, this book refers to MATLAB 5.3 (Release 11). Congratulations to the authors on such a thorough guide.

Many 'engineering' matlab books don't live up their titles. They are simply written as general introductions to matlab with a few useless thoughts about engineering thrown in.

In my opinion, a good matlab engineering book focuses less on general tips that you could get anywhere, and more on practical problem solving techniques and methodologies that provide insight into a paticular engineering problem and its solution.

This books succeeds in that respect. Though it gives space to the more general issues of using matlab, it gives ample room to specific engineering problems. I found its information and examples very useful. The topics are focused on mechanical engineering fields, such as vibration and control; however, the math used for such topics are used across engineering and science disciplines. Thus, any scientist or engineer will find this book useful.

The book is written so that engineers at many levels can benefit from it. For example, as a former graduate student, I found the treatments of vibration response analysis insightful. However, an undergraduate or otherwise inexperienced user would benefit from this book as well, because there is alot of general discussion of how to effectively and efficiently use matlab and write m-files.

All in all, I found this book excellent for both its treatment of high level engineering analysis issues and its more general matlab tips and discussion.

This one is really for engineers, it goes over the basics first, subsequently it goes into more details. It has handy examples of mechanics, dynamics...etc. if you are a mechanical or an electrical engineer, and you are a matlab user, this book would mean a lot to you.

I already had a few years of experience with Matlab before purchasing this book, but I still found it to be very useful. It goes through the usual introductory concepts, but then dedicates a significant portion of the book to science and engineering related discussion, which may be useful to those new to Matlab and interested in its field-specific applications. Retuning to the usual introductory concepts, after years of exerience, I found most of it to be "old news", but there were still some elementary functions that I was unaware of and coding techniques that together allow me to write shorter, more time-efficient, and more readable (to outsiders) code. Buy it!

This book is not a begginers text. Examples are all geared towards engineering which makes it hard to grasp the concepts of MATLAB. You spend a lot of time figuring out what the heck the equation means/represents and have little time left to really solve problems. I recommend starting with a book to learn the basics and if you need to learn more than get this book. This is a graduate level textbook if anything. There are also numerous mistakes and errors in the typing. Most errors are found in the end of chapter problems. Also there are no solutions in the back of the book to assist you in learning how to do the problems. Overall I would never recommend this book to any one new to MATLAB or to anyone that is not planning on using MATLAB extensivily in their particullar field of engineering.

********* 06/15/2011 UPDATE *********

Now that I've owned this book for over a year, I just wanted to say I still stand by my original comments (below) and still believe this is a 5 star book. Over the last year, this book has accelerated my ability to become proficient in MATLAB and it's NOT simply a copy and paste of the MATLAB help documentation. I particularly recommend this for Mechanical Engineering students.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW:

I've owned the 3rd Edition of this book for about a week now. Therefore, it is difficult for me to give a truly complete review, but I have at least skimmed through the various chapters. This book looks amazing, even for someone with little to no training in MATLAB (like myself). It starts with the basics and quickly moves into the more advanced material without going into unnecessary details about computer programming. It explains how to use the tools you need and gets to the point quick.

I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering and I am very disappointed that a numerical analysis course that utilizes this book was not offered during my undergraduate years. I think it should be mandatory that every senior undergraduate mechanical engineering student fully understand how to utilize MATLAB for solving engineering problems...something that I lacked upon graduating, so now I'm making up for it on my own time with this superb book.

Bottom Line: This book makes the perfect companion for any engineering student interested in learning to solve real-world problems with MATLAB (a commonly used program in the real-world).

Thanks to the many authors of this book!

Bought this for my son in college. It's a Great price! Needed this book for his studies,a must for engineering students.

Among all the matlab reference books I have ever read, this is the best book for engineer and scientist. Strongly recommendation!!

This book is very well written and has a lot examples and problems. Very useful

This is one of the best books out there. I not only used it in my vibrations class back as an undergraduate (and I had vibrations with Magrab too!), I have continued to find new ways to use it in the work world today. Dr. Magrab and the others have written a very useful book that definitely relates engineering to this program.