Customer Reviews

MATLAB Demystified

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

 

 

Overall this book is a reasonable introduction to Matlab 7.x but it tends to drag in places and seem rushed in others. Also, there are enough typographical errors in the examples to make it difficult to arrive at the expected results especially if one is a beginner. For example, the solution to one of the quiz questions in chapter 5 requires the use of the "eval" function which was never introduced in the book.

Oddly one of the most powerful features of Matlab, programming, is pasted onto the end of the statistics chapter as a brief introduction whereas it should have it's own chapter and covered in a lot more detail. Also, there are chapters on transforms and curve fitting but strangely no mention of time series.

Lastly, quizzes at the end of each chapter often leave out key material introduced in that chapter. Also, the final exam at the end of the book leaves out half of the later chapters.

This is an OK book if you want to master the basics of Matlab quickly but on it's own it's not enough. I would recommend the much better Getting Started with MATLAB 7: A Quick Introduction for Scientists and Engineers instead.

First three chapters, The MATLAB Environment, Vectors and Matrices and Plotting and Graphics, provide a good introduction to Matlab. However, author does not mention that the Symbolic Toolbox is required to work the examples in Chapter 5, Solving Algebraic Equations and other Symbolic Tools, Chapter 6. Basic Symbolic Calculus and Differential Equations, Chapter 8 Integration, and Chapter 9 Transforms. It appears the author assumed the only persons who would buy the book were college students who bought the Student edition of Matlab. Persons who only have access to the commercial version of Matlab will not be able to work the examples in Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9.

Another review pointed out the poor editing with this book. For instance, chapter 2 includes a phrase "we have seen how to create a row vector ... using the linspace command" but no reference to the linspace command is ever made. The text also references another MATLAB book, but does not call it out. It almost make me think this is a stripped down text of a larger work, but that is supposition on my part.

The text in the examples is sometimes wrong (y=x^2 will not often work - you need to type y=x.^2) although the book will eventually point out how to enter the correct syntax. I wish it would do this before showing the wrong text to type, though.

All in all, this book is not worth the time needed to detangle it. It is incomplete and needs a new editing pass to make it worthwhile.

If we could classify books intended to teach software in two categories- those focused on the tricks of the latest version and those ones centered in the contextualized applications - MATLAB Demystified would belong to the first class of books. A nice "direct to the point" approach on how to model, code and simulate real life situations. Accessible for all people interested in programming computers easily.

MATLAB DeMystified is a decent enough introduction to the MATLAB language, a decent jumping off block for beginners getting their feel for the language. There are a few things though that plague it:

1. Editing. Chapter references in wrong places, code and the equations based on that code not matching, etc. I know it's hard for a book to be perfect, but for people just starting out, that can be really disorienting. "Is that a typo, or am I not understanding something?"

2. The book relies entirely on manually entering data as vectors or matrices - it would have been preferable to cover, at least somewhat, importing data. Rarely will a student who is using this book be typing the data in by hand - it's error prone, and largely confines the examples in the book to either functions that can be written, or "toy" examples with very small amounts of data.

3. Editing. Seriously, it's bad.

The beginning of the book is good but in the middle of the text I found many errors, omissions in code and CH 7 just left me wondering what the author was speaking about since he did not previously describe the material so I could not understand what was being discussed. I was more mystified with this book.

I think most of the reviews are right on target. The book is a decent introduction. You do need to have the symbolic add-on as mentioned for the later chapters. There are several bad typos which need editing in a future edtion. This is true of several other math books from this publisher.

.. that they are selling this book cheap - I fully agree with both the positive reviews, because I like the approach of the book, but I also fully agree with the negative reviews: the book IS poorly edited, with making references to earlier chapters where things were not treated as they apparently should have been. Yes, this book is a start, but only an average one. You get what you pay for.

If you have no prior knowledge of Matlab then this is probably as good as place to start as any. It is a shortish book which you can work through relatively quickly to give you all the basic skills. For more intermediate or advanced uses of Matlab then this book is not going to be any use, but then you wouldn't expect that given its title. The book uses a series of examples to show you basic features of Matlab, which help you learn quickly the commands and more particularly begin to understand the syntax that are so critical to Matlab and other mathematical software.

I got this as a gift for a future engineer (he's in college), and he loved it!!!