Customer Reviews

Mastering MATLAB 5: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought a number of copies of this book for our departmental library. It serves quite well as a general reference on MATLAB usage. The sections on matrix manipulations, graphics and strings are fine. However, the section on Control Flow is very poor. The power of MATLAB is that it provides an extremely efficient, matrix-based, programming language. This is glossed over in one short chapter, with only trivial illustrative examples. I still refer my students to the book but, for motivating examples, I also refer them to the book by Charles van Loan.

I had used the author's previous edition and found it to be just fair. This new edition, which concentrates on the latest version of MATLAB is an excellent book and a vast improvement. Gone is the simple reproduction of MATLAB help files. This book is a good tutorial in that it provides many examples and procedes from the most elementary concepts to the quite advanced; it is also an excellent reference containing a brief discussion of the many functions that are available but cannot be discussed at length. The user can always access the help files to get the syntax correct. There may be a "bult-in" function that they have missed, but it must be very obscure. I would highly recommend this book for both the MATLAB beginner and for the experienced user who may not be entirely familar with the capabilities of version 5. Be advised however, that this is a book about MATLAB and not tutorial in linear (matrix) algebra. Dolores Etter's books (also by Prentice-Hall) are more suited to that purpose.

As a practising engineer, I have a strong background in mathematics and programming. I have none in MATLAB. I found that the book had serious flaws, the least of which is a decent index (how can a book claim to be a reference with such a weak index!). I had to rely on other books to give me the introduction to MATLAB that I needed. This book made it hard to find the "how to" type information that most beginners/intermediates need.

Its OK for experienced users who already know what function calls they're supposed to be using.

As a newcomer to Matlab, I bought the book in hopes it would speed up my learning curve. I found it useful as an introduction; but the book is hardly comprenhensive either as a reference or a tutorial as the title would suggest. When it came to actually doing something useful, like a loop that decments or producing axis scales for an image, I found the standard Matlab documentation much more helpful. Lack of a syntax specification for functions make the book of questional value as a "reference". Buy this book only if need an introduction to Matlab; and, are willing to pay top dollar

This book is a great complete introduction to Matlab 5 and for novice users. The sections on Handle Graphics and Graphical User Interface (GUI) development are very useful for someone starting GUI work in Matlab. Not useful for more advanced users of Matlab. Overall the text is easy to read and understand, and a good reference. Well worth the price.

This book provides a very good overview of Matlab which supplements the excellent detailed electronic documentation which is provided by MathWorks. For me, a self-taught user of Matlab and Simulink for 2 years, the book was of great value as an introduction to features of Matlab which I had not been using. I would recommend this to any new Matlab user as an overview, but not for detailed documentation of the current version of the software.

I'm an experience programmer and I learned Matlab from this book but I never really read it. Typically, I used it as a reference, looking up a function when I needed it. I'm just amazed that after 1 year (of full time matlab programming, I wrote a matlab toolbox myself), I'm still using the book. You find what you're looking for easylly from the index. It's clear, short but very deep and detailled and the chapter are cleverly organized. That's the best programming book I've been using. I would like all of them to be like that.

This book might be great for new users to MATLAB, but even then, I am not sure that it is much more help then the text or the help files that come with the software. I was hoping for a reference that went in to more detail than the help files and covered more advanced topics or commands.

Everyone has their own skill set and knowledge base, but, I didn't find this to be very useful. I am an engineering student with a decent college math background and several C++ courses under my belt, I didn't find this text to be helpful at all in learning Matlab. I ended up doing much better reading the on-line help, if you have a good internet connect, there isn't much point using anything else in my opinion.

On first need for help, trying to learn algebraic manipulation/syntax of Matlab, the Contents and the Index are totally devoid of anything relating to this subject.

Nor did a painfull search through the book indicate that there is any information on this subject. e.g., try to find: Algebra Solve Simultaneous Equation or any other related topic. FORGET IT