Introduction to MATLAB for Engineering Students

The tutorials are independent of the rest of the document. The primarily objective is to help you learn quickly the first steps. The emphasis here is “learning by doing”. Therefore, the best way to learn is by trying it yourself. Working through the examples will give you a feel for the way that MATLAB operates. In this introduction we will describe how MATLAB handles simple numerical expressions and mathematical formulas.

The name MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory. MATLAB was written originally to provide easy access to matrix software developed by the LINPACK (linear system package) and EISPACK (Eigen system package) projects.

MATLAB is a high-performance language for technical computing. It integrates computation, visualization, and programming environment. Furthermore, MATLAB is a modern programming language environment: it has sophisticated data structures, contains built-in editing and debugging tools, and supports object-oriented programming. These factors make MATLAB an excellent tool for teaching and research.

MATLAB has many advantages compared to conventional computer languages (e.g., C, FORTRAN) for solving technical problems. MATLAB is an interactive system whose basic data element is an array that does not require dimensioning. The software package has been commercially available since 1984 and is now considered as a standard tool at most universities and industries worldwide.

It has powerful built-in routines that enable a very wide variety of computations. It also has easy to use graphics commands that make the visualization of results immediately available. Specific applications are collected in packages referred to as toolbox. There are toolboxes for signal processing, symbolic computation, control theory, simulation, optimization, and several other fields of applied science and engineering.