I have no experience of using MATLAB but I would like to learn it (part time) in 6 weeks, probaby to a respectable standard, for something I'm doing over the summer.

 

I am keen to learn how to use it but is this a realistic aim in 6 weeks? I will have to teach myself.

 

Can anyone advise/comment on this?

 

Are there any books which are good and assume no previous knowledge?

 

(I need to make a decision in the next day or so)

it can be done, it was a part of one of my uni classes and it took 3 weeks to get familiar with it. have you ever used BASIC? if so you'll be fine.

I'm very good at Visual Basic... but never used BASIC. I do understand there are great differences in the two though. Also from what I've read BASIC doesn't sound too hard, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

How did you learn it in 3 weeks? Were you given lessons or a book or online tutorial? As I'm teaching this to myself I will either have to find/buy a book unless there's some good tutorials on the Internet.

it was a sort of crappy booklet thing that didn't really explain things too well but

it got the basics across and you can use the help to get the more advanced things. as for the three week thing, i missed the first 4 weeks of class(nobody informed me as to where the class actually was and the directory sucks ass and didn't list the class) so i stayed up late trying to get it right. its not too difficult

Why PM me? If i knew anything about Matlab I would have told you.

I told you; because it was urgent. I need to make a decision quickly and I respect you and know you are very knowledgeable in your subject, so I hoped you could help. Sorry if it bothered you. (Like I said in the PM, I wouldn't normally do that)

Matlab isn't particularly hard to "learn" as such, it just requires a little effort getting to grips with the syntax and common commands.

Thanks a lot guys.

 

Any recommendations on how to learn it? Any good books or online tutorials that any recommends or knows of?

 

I've found this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195179374/qid=1150713867/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-0598929-6403014

book on Amazon and it looks good (and has good reviews), has anyone used it?

I want to learn it too. I have access to the book "Mastering MATLAB", it's a decent book, but the help and demos on MATLAB are very well done and for now it was enough for me.

OK, so got two questions at the moment regarding the use of MATLAB.

 

Firstly:

n=4
x = -n:1:n
y=x.^2
plot(x,y)

is a correct code for plotting x vs. x² however my question is why do you need the dot in the line:

y=x.^2

what is the purpose of that dot? Why can you not just say: y=x^2 ?

 

Secondly:

x=[0:0.1:pi]'
y=x'
z=sin(x*y)
mesh(x,y,z)

will plot a nice 3D graph of f(x)=sin(x) I've noticed that you must include the dash ' at the end of the first two lines, from experimenting this seems to mean that x and y are processed as columns and not rows. Is this the reason for having the dash and if so how do you know when you need a dash (e.g. for x and y) and when you do not (e.g. for z)

 

Thanks again for the help.

OK' date=' so got two questions at the moment regarding the use of MATLAB.

 

Firstly:

n=4
x = -n:1:n
y=x.^2
plot(x,y)

is a correct code for plotting x vs. x² however my question is why do you need the dot in the line:

y=x.^2

what is the purpose of that dot? Why can you not just say: y=x^2 ?[/quote']It does the squaring elementwise - this is important with bigger matrices, ie. you may want to multiply each row of a nxn matrix by a scalar stroed in a nx1 matrix using the '.'

Secondly:

x=[0:0.1:pi]'
y=x'
z=sin(x*y)
mesh(x,y,z)

will plot a nice 3D graph of f(x)=sin(x) I've noticed that you must include the dash ' at the end of the first two lines, from experimenting this seems to mean that x and y are processed as columns and not rows. Is this the reason for having the dash and if so how do you know when you need a dash (e.g. for x and y) and when you do not (e.g. for z)

 

Thanks again for the help.

Yeah - the dash transposes the matrix.

 

In your example, the dash means that the dimensions of the multiplication are correct, eg. in your example this ensures that z is a matrix of size 32x32