TABLE OF CONTENTS The objectives of this chapter are to enable you to use some simple MATLAB commands from the Command Window and to examine various MATLAB desktop and editing features.
MATLAB is a powerful computing system for handling the calculations involved in scientific and engineering problems. The name MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory, because the system was designed to make matrix computations particularly easy. If you don't know what a matrix is, don't worry we will look at them in detail later.
This book assumes that you have never used a computer before to do the sort of scientific calculations that MATLAB handles. You will, however, need to be able to find your way around a computer keyboard and the operating system running on your computer (e.g. Windows or UNIX). 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 which 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 the answers immediately. The problems solved in this way can be very simple, like finding a square root, or they can be much more complicated, like finding the solution to a system of differential equations. For many technical problems you have to enter only one or two commands, and you get the answers at once. MATLAB does most of the work for...
