For novice programmers who would like to learn how to use the software package MATLAB, this book is an ideal guide. The book assumes that the reader has no prior programming experience and introduces MATLAB by way of programming examples.
The book can be used as a companion to self-study, but would also be ideal as a class textbook. The examples are simple and concise, and are designed to help introduce the various programming concepts. Each of the ten chapters begins with a clear statement of the learning objectives and topics to be discussed.
The chapters can be divided naturally into three parts. In the first part of the book, the authors introduce the MATLAB integrated development environment (IDE) and various basic programming features and structures common to all programming languages, such as variables, operators, vectors, arrays, and so on. In this part, the authors introduce the basic syntax of MATLAB using simplistic arithmetic expressions. Once the syntax is introduced, more complex data structures are explained using examples. In addition, MATLAB-specific idiosyncrasies are clearly explained early on, again with the use of examples.
The second part uses examples to present more complex concepts, such as functions, control flow, and repetitions, again common features of all programming languages. These can then be used to express complicated tasks otherwise requiring many steps to accomplish. As with the other parts, at the end of each chapter, there is a set of exercise questions or problems, which the reader is encouraged to solve. The exercises vary in difficulty, but usually they emphasize the concepts introduced in the current chapter.
In the last part, the authors introduce more advanced concepts, including debugging and calculus, which are rather MATLAB specific. Perhaps one of the most important features discussed in this part is the symbolic solver, which appears in MATLAB as part of the Symbolic Math Toolbox. A symbolic solver is an extremely powerful tool that enables the user to express and manipulate algebraic equations with respect to some symbols, such as x2 + 2x + 3, rather than having to evaluate the equation at a given point, such as when x = 0.1. As a result, the differentiation and integration of a symbolic expression can be done quite quickly. This is of particular importance when dealing with optimization problems where the task is to find the value of one or more variables that minimize (or maximize) the equation. As the authors explain, in this example, computing the symbolic derivative and solving for 0 will provide the result. Similar optimization problems are very common in computer science generally, and particularly in artificial intelligence, computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning.
Overall, I would recommend this very good book to anyone interested in learning or teaching how to program with MATLAB. What better way to learn than by doing?
