A Beginner’s Guide to Matlab

MATLAB, which stands for MATrix LABoratory, is a state-of-the-art mathematical software package, which is used extensively in both academia and industry. It is an interactive program for numerical computation and data visualization, which along with its programming capabilities provides a very useful tool for almost all areas of science and engineering. Unlike other mathematical packages, such as MAPLE or MATHEMATICA, MATLAB cannot perform symbolic manipulations without the use of additional Toolboxes. It remains, however, one of the leading software packages for numerical computation.

As you might guess from its name, MATLAB deals mainly with matrices. A scalar is a 1-by-1 matrix and a row vector of length say 5, is a 1-by-5 matrix. We will elaborate more on these and other features of MATLAB in the sections that follow. One of the many advantages of MATLAB is the natural notation used. It looks a lot like the notation that you encounter in a linear algebra course. This makes the use of the program especially easy and it is what makes MATLAB a natural choice for numerical computations.

The purpose of this tutorial is to familiarize the beginner to MATLAB, by introducing the basic features and commands of the program. It is in no way a complete reference and the reader is encouraged to further enhance his or her knowledge of MATLAB by reading some of the suggested references at the end of this guide.