Customer Reviews

Essential MATLAB for Scientists and Engineers, Second Edition

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

 

 

I have just finished teaching a semester course on Mathematical Programming and Modelling with MATLAB. The students each obtained a copy of the book and I worked through the book with them. The book has very good exercises but I augmented these and, more or less, sat back and watched the students teach themselves in front of the computers. Some of the students had no programming experience at all. This text allows for that situation and gives good advice to the novice. All the students passed the exams, some with 100%. I have the exams as TEX files, if anyone is interested to see what the students can learn in thirteen weeks with the aid of this book. The book is slightly dated now and a few of the MATLAB functions, such as SETSTR, have become obsolete. Of course, this is not a problem and I recommend this book to both students and lecturers.

This book isn't bad, but it does leave a lot to be desired. I was hoping for a comprehensive desk reference on commands, syntax, and maybe even suggestions on strong and concise code for frequently used and frequently problemmatic routines (ie, iterations and for if elseif until stuff). If you are also looking for this, DON"T GET THIS BOOK. If you have some limited programming knowledge and just want to get an overview of Matlab so you can play with it, this would be a fine book. It's written so that it is meant to be used hand in hand with the often inscrutable matlab help files. But if you need a more authoritative source for lengthier and more difficult programs, look elsewhere.

This is a very helpful introduction to Matlab, which can be used by complete beginners and also more experienced users. I think this is one of the better if not the best of the current batch of introductory Matlab books.
In addition to the usual material there are good simple discussions of logical vectors, GUI's, vectorizing code, simulation and numerical integration/differential equations- enough to give you a sensible start.

Good text for learning how to use MATLAB and its functions. No help though on writing in depth codes for finite-differences or finite-element. I'm still searching for the ultimate book for engineers and scientist which feeds you algorithms for models.

I am a second year physics student and used this book during a first year introductory course in MATLAB. It really helps beginners like myself get the 'feel' of loops, functions, etc., and has plenty of good problems.

I thought this was a pretty good introduction to Matlab with lots of accessible examples. I liked the whole book except the part on GUI which I felt was to cursory.

My criticism is that the section on creating GUIs with GUIDE needs to be beefed up. I have yet to find an book that really explains how to use GUIDE clearly so that the user can get some basic functionality such as using a GUI to get user input for a simulation. It would be useful if a MATLAB manual such as this one discussed how a programmer should go about building a MATLAB application that includes a GUI interface. GUIDE has alot of built-in structure that is not intuitive (at least to a non-programmer such as me). It would be great if a guidebook could break it down in enough detail that one is not left wondering about "handles" and "gcbo" and how the code behind the GUI really works. There needs to be more of a blueprint/roadmap to the GUIDE-generated code and the framework that one must work within to make GUIs. How to you get values to use as parameters for a function. How do you pass values to the GUI to display results, or dynamic content. All the examples use code typed right into the GUI's M-file. But what about if you have bigger projects that you want to add a GUI interface too?

Overall, a good book which does live up to its title by providing "essential" basics of Matlab.