The MATLAB 5 Handbook [Paperback]

The Matlab® 5 Handbook by Eva Pärt-Enander and Anders Sjöberg. Addison-Wesley. Harlow, England. Second edition, 1999.

Matlab has evolved into an advanced piece of software for scientific and engineering computation. Although it is an easy-to-use software, it has grown in number of commands, functions and different data types. This makes necessary to have a good reference to take advantage of all its functionality and to be efficient in its use. Pärt-Enander and Sjöberg make this process easier providing this comprehensive and practical guide that may be used as a reference -commands and functions grouped conceptually in boxes for easy location-- or tutorial due to the abundant (around 200) of easy-to-follow examples. The book is intended for learning and reference to beginning and intermediate users and as a reference for advanced users. The material is presented independently of the discipline where it may be used, there is no waste of words in the easy-to-understand descriptions of commands and functions.

The book contains fifteen chapters, four appendices, a bibliography and list of command tables, all this in 559 pages of printed material. Most chapters are self-contained, so you may digest them independently if you have some experience in using the software. The first two chapters are suggested reading for beginner users of Matlab, there you will find a brief introduction about what you can do in Matlab and know how to do basic operations such as starting and quitting, assignments, saving and loading data, arithmetic expressions and mathematical functions and defining your own functions.

Linear algebra is covered from basic to advanced topics: creation of new matrices and their operations, operations on strings, cell matrices or cell arrays containing different data types, bitwise operations, and sets. You may find useful a brief chapter on data manipulation and statistical analysis. The solution of a linear system of equations is one of the common problems arising in most disciplines and is treated in a separate chapter for full matrices, a separate chapter deals with the case of sparse matrices. The book would be incomplete without a coverage of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and Matlab provides some commands for their computation, although only for two-dimensional matrices -yes, besides sparse matrices you may also create multidimensional matrices, but not all operations for two-dimensional matrices work with multidimensional ones.

Some topics in numerical methods are also covered. You will be able to make interpolation and curve and surface fitting, find zeros and minima of one and multidimensional functions, solve definite integrals and ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with adaptive and efficient methods -some ODE methods for stiff systems are also available.

One of Matlab's strengths is to possibility to program in the same environment for development and prototyping. Some chapters present commands to control the execution of Matlab statements -conditional branching, looping, supporting user interaction, debugging and profiling.

Commands for two- and three- dimensional graphics, from plotting simple functions to complex surfaces, patches and animations (or movies) as well as commands to manipulate graphics are covered: labels and text, change of axes (linear and nonlinear), scaling, graphical input of data, viewpoint and perspective control, color control, multiple plots. The graphics system in Matlab is object oriented and the book also covers low-level commands so that you can control your graphics with precision. You can also make use of the commands presented in this book to produce your own graphical user interface, either by using user interface controls directly or the Graphical User Interface Development Environment (GUIDE), to provide better interactivity to the user.

The book also covers how to extend the functionality of Matlab by adding external functions written in C or FORTRAN.

Appendices present a step-by-step introduction for the novice of Matlab, concise definitions and basic concepts in linear algebra, a quick reference to commands and command tables, a brief introduction to other products (toolboxes from MathWorks Inc. and third party toolboxes) that may complement MATLAB, and a non-annotated list of related books.

I have benefited a lot from this book, that is the reason I always keep it at hand. You will find it useful too.