The authors designed this thorough instructional text to be used with MATLAB and the MATLAB Control Toolbox. It consists of nine chapters, of which the first three are an introduction to the MATLAB language and its graphical facilities. These chapters include an understandable discussion of the use of script files and of functions. Here, as later, are a suitable set of exercises for students and a number of script file examples that the reader might find independently useful.

The remaining six chapters consider the standard problems of linear control theory, with numerous script files that could be ported to the reader’s computer. Chapter 4 discusses setting up control problems in both transfer function and state space format. It shows how to move between the two formats and makes the appropriate cautionary comments about the dangers of numerical ill-conditioning in some of the operations provided in the Control Toolbox. It also show how to build systems from serial and parallel feedback diagrams. Chapters 5 through 7 consider calculating and plotting the poles and zeros of the transfer function, root loci, and frequency domains, and address associated design questions. Chapter 8 shows how to build plants with controllers and observers. The authors outline a number of alternative approaches and give due warnings about reliability. The script files in this chapter are complex and potentially useful. The final chapter discusses discrete-time control systems and shows how they approximate continuous-time systems. The emphasis is on the control aspects and on the many approximations available through programming with functions in the toolbox. I recommend this book highly.