Essential MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists

Daniel T. Valentine, Brian H. Hahn, Brian Hahn, Daniel Valentine

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780123946133
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

The fifth edition of Essential MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists provides a concise, balanced overview of MATLAB's functionality that facilitates independent learning, with coverage of both the fundamentals and applications. The essentials of MATLAB are illustrated throughout, featuring complete coverage of the software's windows and menus. Program design and algorithm development are presented clearly and intuitively, along with many examples from a wide range of familiar scientific and engineering areas. This is an ideal book for a first course on MATLAB or for an engineering problem-solving course using MATLAB, as well as a self-learning tutorial for professionals and students expected to learn and apply MATLAB. - Updated with the features of MATLAB R2012b - Expanded discussion of writing functions and scripts - Revised and expanded Part II: Applications - Expanded section on GUIs - More exercises and examples throughout

Part 1

Essentials

Part I Essentials

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 MATLAB Fundamentals

Chapter 3 Program Design and Algorithm Development

Chapter 4 MATLAB Functions and Data Import-Export Utilities

Chapter 5 Logical vectors

Chapter 6 Matrices and Arrays

Chapter 7 Function M-files

Chapter 8 Loops

Chapter 9 MATLAB Graphics

Chapter 10 Vectors as Arrays and Other Data Structures

Chapter 11 Errors and Pitfalls

Part I

Essentials

Part 1 concerns those aspects of MATLAB that you need to know in order to come to grips with MATLAB’s essentials and those of technical computing. Because this book is a tutorial, you are encouraged to use MATLAB extensively while you go through the text.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The objectives of this chapter are:

To enable you to use some simple MATLAB commands from the Command Window

To examine various MATLAB desktop and editing features

To learn some of the new features of the MATLAB R2012b Desktop

To learn to write scripts in the Editor and Run them from the Editor

To learn some of the new features associated with the tabs (in particular, the PUBLISH and APPS features)

MATLAB is a powerful technical computing system for handling scientific and engineering calculations. The name MATLAB stands for Matrix Laboratory, because the system was designed to make matrix computations particularly easy. A matrix is an array of numbers organized in m rows and n columns. An example is the following m × n = 2 × 3 array:

Any one of the elements in a matrix can be plucked out by using the row and column indices that identify its location. The elements in this example are plucked out as follows: A(1, 1) = 1, A(1, 2) = 3, A(1, 3) = 5, A(2, 1) = 2, A(2, 2) = 4, A(2, 3) = 6. The first index identifies the row number counted from top to bottom; the second index is the column number counted from left to right. This is the convention used in MATLAB to locate information in an array. A computer is useful because it can do numerous computations quickly, so operating on large numerical data sets listed in tables as arrays or matrices of rows and columns is quite efficient.

This book assumes that you have never used a computer before to do the sort of scientific calculations that MATLAB handles, but are able to find your way around a computer keyboard and know your operating system (e.g., Windows, UNIX, or MAC-OS). The only other computer-related skill you will need is some very basic text editing.

One of the many things you will like about MATLAB (and that distinguishes it from many other computer programming systems, such as C++ and Java) is that you can use it interactively. This means you type some commands at the special MATLAB prompt and get results immediately. The problems solved in this way can be very simple, like finding a square root, or very complicated, like finding the solution to a system of differential equations. For many technical problems, you enter only one or two commands—MATLAB does most of the work for you.

There are three essential requirements for successful MATLAB applications:

You must learn the exact rules for writing MATLAB statements and using MATLAB utilities.

You must know the mathematics associated with the problem you want to solve.

You must develop a logical plan of attack—the algorithm—for solving a particular problem.

This chapter is devoted mainly to the first requirement: learning some basic MATLA...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Part 1: Essentials
• Part 2: Applications
• Appendix A. Syntax Quick Reference
• Appendix B. Command and Function Quick Reference
• Appendix C. ASCII Character Codes
• Appendix D. Solutions to Selected Exercises
• Index