Customer Reviews

MATLAB Programming for Engineers

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

 

 

The book is a good start to MATLAB students but there is a lot of errors in the text. Despite the author's appeal asking everybody to show him the errors, I think it would be better to rewrite the book, mainly because his work could be more useful if he insert a specific chapter about I/O operations, which is, in my opinion, the most dificult thing to do in MATLAB. Examples of I/O operations with several data formats would be useful too.

I am not a full time computer programmer. In spite of my limited programming experience, I was able to follow the lessons in this book. The information is presented in a logical sequence and fully explained and illustrated. As the title suggests, this book is for engineers who need answers for their own use and is not intended to show you how to make fancy illustrations for presentations.
There are two shortcomings that bothered me. One is the lack of a table at the end of each chapter listing the other commands and functions that do almost the same thing as the ones covered in the chapter. This would increase this book's usefulness as a reference. The other problem is the end of each chapter having an illustration of some interesting engineering project or concept. One claimed that Matlab could be used to drastically improve the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles. The other was a half baked political statement to the effect that you would be better off giving irrevocable control of your life over to a group of people who have a history of looking after their own interests first and others second. Of course this suggestion was worded in an appealing style.

The book is expensive for paperback but it is very helpful for my matlab class. If you have the previous version already, don't bother with this one its almost the same except some homework problems are switched (just find a friend and write down the problem). B+

This is a great text. Easy to read and many good examples illustrated in the book allow you to quickly pick up MATLAB, especially the GUI section. It's very clear and up-to-date. Unlike some other texts just tell you the inefficient Matlab 4.x code for the GUI programing.

*I am a undergraduate engineering student by the way.

This is a great book for learning Matlab. It starts from very, very basic stuff, and picks up at a steady pace, teaching u tons of things with ease. This is the official book of my College Course "Computer Programming for Mechanical Engineers", and I'm doing great in it with the help of this book.

If you are needing this book for a course, but want to spend less money, you can buy the author's more recent book, "Essentials of MATLAB Programming" (November 7, 2008), which is almost exactly the same as this one, but without the last four chapters, and revised to cover MATLAB version 7.5. On my brief comparison of the two texts, even the exercises look to be the same. So, if your class doesn't use the last four chapters, I would point this out to your professor to see if you can use the other, less expensive, book.

The missing chapters in the latter, "Essentials", book are: Chapter 8: Input/Output Functions, Chapter 9: Handle Graphics, Chapter 10: Graphical User Interfaces, and Chapter 11: The MATLAB compiler. If you do decide to get the "Essentials" book, make sure to get the latest one, which was released November 7, 2008, and is copyright 2009. Amazon will only let me directly link to a previous edition of it at the moment, so I've decided not to link to it, to avoid any confusion.

Buy this if you are completely lost or aren't much of an analytical thinker. Otherwise, just type "help function" in the command window.

I never really needed to open this book, but did so on occaision for curiousity's sake--not very clear on a lot of areas, you learn best by playing with the program.

Book arrived very quickly and in great condition. I would buy from this seller again.

Bought Matlab. This company spends more time/resources making sure you don't steal it (ie allowing you to install it on your own computers hassle-free)...then it does in working the bugs out. It is advertised as working with Os X....GOOD LUCK getting it to run right. This stupid program was so important that I had to run out and buy an Intel iMac..Install that Bootcamp/Windows OS "thing", and install Matlab on the pc side so that I could have stable environment. This P.O.S. is NOT Mac compatible... Sooo...having said that....whatcha think?

Dear Matlab Folks: drop the RETARDED activation scheme which ONLY hurts LEGITIMATE users ( you can find lots of cracked versions in the newsgroups btw) and make this program WORK.