Customer Reviews

MATLAB for Neuroscientists: An Introduction to Scientific Computing in MATLAB

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

 

 

I had no previous background in programming or computer science, but based on the reviews I bought this book as an introduction to learning Matlab because it was more specific to the field I'm in. I am REALLY surprised at the reviews that say this book is for beginners. I agree with the previous review that says the book starts off easy to understand, and then it feels like it leaves you on your own to figure out a lot of things.

For example, I was trying to complete the first project on my own and using only the commands covered in the previous chapters. I had to ask for help from friends and despite me telling them "I don't think I'm supposed to use that command because they haven't explained it yet" they still gave me other ways to write certain functions that weren't covered. Since I couldn't figure out how to integrate some of the previous material, I wrote the project program with commands that weren't covered by the book up to that point. It was pretty unsatisfying and discouraging. Not the book's fault that my friends didn't use what was taught, but it does lack some guidance for the projects.

My biggest complaint is that I can't find sample programs for the projects! I've checked the companion website and tried to buy the answer manual online, but you have to prove that you're a professor in order to buy it. Available answers would really help someone like me (who has ZERO intuition for programming) get started on projects and find more efficient ways of writing programs. It's not the advanced math or methods described that make this text hard to get through, which some reviewers are attributing to the bad reviews.

There are lots of comments that accompany the examples, a color insert, and a really helpful appendix that quickly reviews some matrix algebra. This seems like a good book for someone in neuroscience or psychology who already has some background in Matlab. But if you're just starting out, especially without any background in programming, this book will likely discourage you. Also, I could see how this book would be good for a beginning course because you've got a professor to guide you through the text. However, I'd recommend David Rosenbaum's "Matlab for Behavioral Scientists" for a beginning text if you're teaching yourself. After reading that book, I've looked back at this book and can understand everything much better.

This book will help you understand Matlab better especially if you are going into neuroscience. However, it is lacking in examples and sometimes the explanations are not very clear. I would only recommend this book if you already have some Matlab experience and not for the amateur programmer. Other than that, the book is quite detailed and full of colour.

I love ebooks...they are so much more convenient than books I have to tote around....
and this is a good book. Kudos to the authors. I am really enjoying it.

BUT apparently the EBOOK DOES NOT COME WITH ACCESS TO THE COMPANION WEBSITE.

I hope that Amazon and Elsevier will make this clear in the future. Here is what Elsevier said when I inquired about how to get access to the companion site:

Dear XXXXX,

Thanks for your inquiry. To obtain online access customers must purchase the print + online access package.

I apologize for any confusion you may have experienced when purchasing this product from Amazon.com.
In most cases the Kindle version does not include any of the extra materials that accompany the hard bound versions of our books.
This includes access to web sites, CDs, or DVDs.
I'm sorry but our marketing department has made that decision for our titles, and in most cases has
lowered the Kindle price to reflect the absence of those materials. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

John Brown
Customer Service Americas
Online Technical Support Team
Elsevier
3251 Riverport Lane
Maryland Heights MO 63043

I think this book should be the first reading of anybody wanting to learn about computational neuroscience that has no background knowledge of MATLAB. It is a great tool for experienced programmers too.

This book is valuable most of all because it is timely. In recent decades neuroscience has relied increasingly on engineering and mathematical principles to makes sense of a complex system, but software and literature have both lagged behind. Matlab is equipped with functions and toolkits that make most analyses possible, but computational neuroscientists have had to spend countless hours implementing the various functions for their purposes. And up to now there haven't been any books that cover most of the Matlab functions one would use as a computational neuroscientist.

Matlab for Neuroscientists does a good job of this. The authors have selected methods that are commonly used in computational neuroscience, emphasizing ones that tend to be difficult to implement. The result is a book that could save you a great deal of time if you analyze systems neuroscience data. The book is also quite instructive on its own; the computational principles are presented clearly, and unlike many Matlab books which simply describe procedures, this book explains how Matlab functions actually work. In other words, this book doesn't simply explain what to do, it teaches you how to use Matlab effectively.

Computational neuroscientists didn't invent math or engineering, so the topics covered in this book are pertinent to a variety applications; e.g. image processing and computer vision, various statistical applications, machine learning, and neural networks. As a result, people with a mathematical or engineering background could use Matlab and this book together to learn the basics of computational neuroscience quite efficiently.

Long overdue... I wish this book had been available when I was a grad student. Might have saved me a lot of trouble. Very thorough, relatively comprehensive.

Being able to use actual data (available from the website) definitely helps to get a feel for common analysis methods in neuroscience.

All in all, it introduces a modern language of scientific computing (Matlab) to a modern field (Neuroscience) in a very "fitting" way. The end product is rather satisfactory. My only question is why no one wrote something like that earlier. Matlab has been around for a while.

I will recommend this book to all my students and friends.

Most of the things I wanted to say have already been said before, so I will make this brief...
This really is a good book, very insightful and pleasant to read. It made quite a difference for me starting out, and I was a beginner when I read this.

This covers almost all the important stuff that is required by a begginer. Like all the important matlab stuff. Though some of the concepts related to the neural physiology are implicit. I think this book is a great tool to learn matlab if you have a neural science background.

So I'm about to give up on this book. I'm a beginner in Matlab and threw it on the wall several times already.
It starts out very nice and easy, but then the authors make a huuuuuuuuge jump out of a sudden and advise to do some projects that I don't understand at all. I don't even understand the assignment itself and can't comprehend the structure even with the answers in front of me. I really don't know how beginners are supposed to manage this. It's so frustrating right now.
Besides that, a lot of the examples aren't explained at all. You're supposed to type in sth and understand it? I don't, and I learned other computer-programs before (though I'm admittedly no computergeek).
Suggestion to the authors, since I've seen you read this: why isn't there a discussion-board on the website (btw. the website is really hard to find, the webadress should be in the book somewhere (I haven't seen it))

In summary: it's a pity and a lot of frustration for beginners, would have been so nice to have a good book for neuroscientific matlab-beginners...

There are many things they should write on this book about how to use MatLab to study the brain (ex: fmri). The book describe only the surface of the topic, not in detail.