Customer Reviews

Getting Started with MATLAB 7: A Quick Introduction for Scientists and Engineers (The Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a true joy to read. It is well-organized, well-written, and provides the most clearly illustrated (through examples and figures) introduction to MATLAB I have found. More importantly, it is specifically geared to scientists and engineers e.g. those seeking to exploit MATLAB's numerical methods capabilities either for teaching, learning, or researching. Each chapter contains relevant and useful exercises from the material and provides complete answers for you to check your work right away. The sections on graphics and publishing are very nice and demonstrate how MATLAB is a full-service software tool. The second half of the book provides an excellent overview of "Applications" - basically, numerical methods using MATLAB. The book focuses on the built-in functions for root finding, quadrature, ODEs, etc. but not the details of the algorithms themselves (here it refers you to a numerical methods textbook). This should be the first book any scientist or engineers buys when starting to learn MATLAB. The MATLAB Guide by Higham and Higham (2nd Edition, SIAM) should be next . . . Enjoy!

I think this is a really nice and user friendly book if you look for a painless intro to mathlab, or if you look for the quick and essential tips that can get you started hands-on with a few functions or programs. No prerequisites are needed!
Of the computer and programming tools out there in math and in CS, Matlab is probably the one that it tailored more directly to numerical computations and to matrices (to graphics too!); as opposed to symbolic manipulations, where perhaps Mathematica and Mable have an edge. Yet, these choices often come down to a matter of taste, and to what you are used to. Or what the book or the class is steering you towards.
Still, I noticed over the past year, that teachers and students involved with elementary numerical analysis, math, or CS courses have liked this little book. And yet, there are lots of other Matlab-books out there; as well as manuals, step-by-step guides, etc; and some are even free on the web. Thanks God for Google! But this little book seems especially attractive for beginners.
Review by Palle Jorgensen, January 29, 2006.

Pratap teaches the latest version of Matlab to someone who need never have encountered symbolic algebra before. The basics are covered in enough detail to get you up and running with Matlab. Hopefully so that you can decide if your problems are suitable for tackling with Matlab, and if so, how to get input a problem and extract an answer.

This guide understandably does not give the full scope of Matlab's abilities. That is left for more advanced texts. Pratap's book is suitable for an undergraduate level course.

Like Mathematica and Maple, MatLab has now been around long enough to have a wide variety of custom plug in applications available, many free on the web (.M files are source/ASCII; .MAT are immediately executable binary files). Since MathWorks dropped Maple as a sub (graphic) engine and added MuPAD, MatLab's graphics (already the best) have been supercharged. The latest edition (2010) of Pratap's fine book picks up at release 6-- and MathWorks is now selling release 12+. The book is completely up to date. Oxford's update website for the book is not yet up for this release ([...]) at the time of this review, which is surprising since the book's been around for 16 years.

Don't let the title mislead you-- because of its power, both MatLab and this beginner's guide are outstanding for ANY field that is vector process driven, or graphically intensive, including Neurology, Molecular Biology, Finance, and video game programming to name a few-- any field that is heavy on vectors and matrices, in fact (MatLab stands for MatrixLaboratory). Don't let the Matrix foundation scare you, however, because the popularity of this program has now brought it up to Mathematica and Maple level with symbolic math also (the SM toolbox comes with the student editions of the software), which means MatLab will not only process flat files from other sources (including C, Fortran and Java as well as Mathematica and Maple), but its own algebraic/symbolic calculation power is just as formidable as Mathematica once you learn it, with the added benefit of being able to breeze through 2D, 3D and even animation graphics.

If you're in an advanced calculus, numerical analysis, Fourier, or even applications class, you'll love the graphics in this program, which are very intuitive, and Pratap does a great job hitting just the right starting points. It is a seamless transition from Pratap to MatLab's own online help documentation. Add plug ins from your own field, or discs and files available from publishers in many fields, and you've got the 1-2-3 punch to get really good, really fast, with this program.

The astonishing thing about both this book and the program, is that you can approach as a user from any level of competence, because the program itself encompasses a progression from simple use as an application (like Excel), to user-defined functions (like macros or writing in Visual Basic), to actual object-level programming (yes, this also is a high level language with a DOS/Fortran/Unix/C++ like interface with program/file lines in which you also can write custom applications, and the software automatically compiles your coding and even seamlessly uses your own user-written functions like they were the program's own built-in functions!). For a beginner, this means you can get modules written specifically in your field, and this book and the program step you into using them right away, even if you do no programming at all.

If your future field is math/graphics intensive (and even ODE's and PDE's are now thought of more as graphs than just functions), this book and familiarity with MatLab is a must. Even high level compiled applications programs (such as those used to program video games, and the Adobe matrix/vector code) dump back and forth between MatLab, which allows the user to see the underlying vectors to adjust input and output, without having to work at the polynomial level. The program is so user friendly, that you can animate functions that you don't even understand (ok, your unconscious will be doing Fourier transforms as your brain resonates with the graphics, but you don't have to be applying chain rules in your prefrontal cortex at the same time).

This little guide is a MUST HAVE and great starting point if you're ready to supercharge your understanding of math graphically and via animation-- regardless of your field. And if you teach-- what a treat for your students to see what those functions and transforms look like when animated!

Learning Matlab can be a little tricky, especially for college students with little prior experience in programming. Getting Started With Matlab 7 helps tremendously to bring the reader up to speed. The author first introduces Matlab and has the reader doing several simple yet engaging exercises that helps one get oriented with how to run the program. Then, the author has the reader dig a little deeper and begin to do more substantial and impressive programming. There is a good section on creating and manipulating arrays, which was heaven-sent for myself personally. The book describes how to use Matlab to tackle mathematical problems, such as solving ODE's, better than the help section in Matlab itself. Finally, there is a section on troubleshooting errors (always handy) and a little chapter talking about other packages that can be added on to Matlab.

There are a few quirks to this book. Sometimes the exercises require use of commands that have not been covered yet in the text, which is a little frustrating. However, this is a minor issue and actually can aid in the learning process. For this student, Getting Started With Matlab 7 has been a lifesaver. I have been able to understand a program that has always mystified me, while suffering little pain from the process.

This is a great book for you, if you already know C/C++ and want to learn some Matlab as quickly as possible. An excellent text for Math/CS undergraduates wanting to learn enough, so they could carry off their project work. But thats it. The book doesnt go deeper into this exceptional tool. This is purely an introductory book, and a bit expensive for that.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Being an introductory MATLAB text, it does a good job of presenting the basic concept followed by lots of examples. For example, just chapter 2 alone covers at least 10 different topics. Definitely a lot more breadth than depth type of learning. This works if you like to know all these different topics.

But if you like to learn more on the fundamentals before digging further on all the functions/features, you may be a bit frustrated. For example, you may want to know (i) if MATLAB is a strong-typed language or not; (ii) what data types does it support; (iii) how do you lay out the structure of the program if it is not a trivial program - all these questions you may have would not reveal till a lot later if at all. In comparison with other programming language book where it emphasizes on basics and fundamental building blocks.

Also, this text is not sufficient to learn programming if this is your first exposure to programming. The explanations on topics such as data structures, algorithms, let alone recursion, matrix decomposition (QR, Cholesky, SVD) may not be enough. The text could be better if answers are provided for the latter part of the chapters.

Even though this book is relatively new, some of material is somewhat obsolete. For example, the author should recommend using 'strfind' instead of 'findstr' as the later will be removed in a future release (from MathWorks web site).

All in all, this is a decent book to learn MATLAB if you are somewhat familar to linear algebra and/or numerical analysis. This is also a good text to learn what MATLAB can do.

This book is extremely helpful for novice MATLAB users who need to generate results quickly. It is concise and easy to navigate.

This is an introductory book to MATLAB. It covers the basics including programming. It also has a chapter on numerical methods. Both two-dimensioanl graphs and three dimensional graphs are also discussed. At the end of the book, the author provides a brief introduction to the Symbolic Math Toolbox. If you are just beginning to learn MATLAB, you may also want to check the book "MATLAB for Beginners: A Gentle Approach".

On top of all the positive comments here, I enjoyed the author's occasional jokes. They gave me a relief :)