MATLAB Programming for Engineers

Rating:
Summary: A good first book for beginners
Review: I am not a full time computer programmer. In spite of my limited programming experience, I was able to follow the lessons in this book. The information is presented in a logical sequence and fully explained and illustrated. As the title suggests, this book is for engineers who need answers for their own use and is not intended to show you how to make fancy illustrations for presentations.
There are two shortcomings that bothered me. One is the lack of a table at the end of each chapter listing the other commands and functions that do almost the same thing as the ones covered in the chapter. This would increase this book's usefulness as a reference. The other problem is the end of each chapter having an illustration of some interesting engineering project or concept. One claimed that Matlab could be used to drastically improve the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles. The other was a half baked political statement to the effect that you would be better off giving irrevocable control of your life over to a group of people who have a history of looking after their own interests first and others second. Of course this suggestion was worded in an appealing style.

Rating:
Summary: A good first book for beginners
Review: I am not a full time computer programmer. In spite of my limited programming experience, I was able to follow the lessons in this book. The information is presented in a logical sequence and fully explained and illustrated. As the title suggests, this book is for engineers who need answers for their own use and is not intended to show you how to make fancy illustrations for presentations.
There are two shortcomings that bothered me. One is the lack of a table at the end of each chapter listing the other commands and functions that do almost the same thing as the ones covered in the chapter. This would increase this book's usefulness as a reference. The other problem is the end of each chapter having an illustration of some interesting engineering project or concept. One claimed that Matlab could be used to drastically improve the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles. The other was a half baked political statement to the effect that you would be better off giving irrevocable control of your life over to a group of people who have a history of looking after their own interests first and others second. Of course this suggestion was worded in an appealing style.

Rating:
Summary: The features of this book, and the motivation behind it.
Review: MATLAB (short for MATrix LABoratory) is a special-purpose computer program optimized to perform engineering and scientific calculations. It started life as a program designed to perform matrix mathematics, but over the years it has grown into a flexible computing system capable of solving essentially any technical problem.

The MATLAB program implements the MATLAB language, and provides a very extensive library of pre-defined functions to make technical programming tasks easier and more efficient. This extremely wide variety of functions makes it much easier to solve technical problems in MATLAB than in other languages such as Fortran or C. This book introduces the MATLAB language, and shows how to use it to solve typical technical problems.

The book teaches MATLAB as a technical programming language, showing students how to write clean, efficient and documented programs. It makes no pretense at being a complete description of all of MATLAB's hundreds of functions. Instead, it teaches the student how to use MATLAB as a language, and how to locate any desired function with MATLAB's extensive on-line help facilities.

The first six chapters of the text are designed to serve as the text for an "Introduction to Programming / Problem Solving" course for freshman engineering students. This material should fit comfortably into an 9 week, 3-hour course. The remaining chapters cover advanced topics such as I/O and Graphical User Interfaces. These chapters may be covered in a longer course, or used as a reference by engineering students or practicing engineers who use MATLAB as a part of their coursework or employment.

Why I Wrote This Book

Today's Freshman engineering programs are under incredible pressure, since more and more material is being crammed into a finite number of hours. The introductory year traditionally includes an "Introduction to Engineering Problem Solving" course and an introductory programming course, but educators have been increasingly finding it hard to fit both courses into the curriculum. My goal for this book is to accomplish the goals of both courses simultaneously, teaching MATLAB as a computer language. MATLAB is both very adaptable to engineering problem solving and an extremely useful computer language. This book simultaneously teaches both the fundamentals of the MATLAB language and a programming style that results in good, maintainable programs.

In addition, many existing MATLAB books have incomplete coverage of the features of the MATLAB programming language, such as low-level I/O, cell arrays, structures, and graphical user interfaces. This book provides a good introduction to such features for practicing engineers who would like to incorporate GUIs into their programs.

Pedagogical Features

The first six chapters of this book are specifically designed to be used in a freshman "Introduction to Programming / Problem Solving" course. It should be possible to cover this material comfortably in a 9-week, 3 hour per week course. If there is insufficient time to cover all of the material in a particular Engineering program, Chapter 6 may be deleted, and the remaining material will still teach the fundamentals of procedural programming and using MATLAB to solve problems. This feature should appeal to harassed engineering educators trying to cram ever more material into a finite curriculum.

The remaining chapters cover advanced material that will be useful to the engineer and student as they progress in their careers. This material includes advanced I/O and the design of Graphical User Interfaces for programs.

The book includes several features designed to aid student comprehension. A total of 15 quizzes appear scattered throughout the chapters, with answers to all questions included in Appendix B. These quizzes can serve as a useful self-test of comprehension. In addition, there are approximately 126 end-of-chapter exercises. Answers to selected exercises are available at the book's Web site, and of course answers to all exercises are included in the Instructor's Manual. Good programming practices are highlighted in all chapters with special Good Programming Practice boxes, and common errors are highlighted in Programming Pitfalls boxes. End of chapter materials include Summaries of Good Programming Practice and Summaries of MATLAB Commands and Functions.

The book is accompanied by an Instructor's Manual, containing the solutions to all end-of-chapter exercises. The Instructor's Manual comes with a floppy disk containing the source code for all examples in the book.

Rating:
Summary: It Could be Better.
Review: The book is a good start to MATLAB students but there is a lot of errors in the text. Despite the author's appeal asking everybody to show him the errors, I think it would be better to rewrite the book, mainly because his work could be more useful if he insert a specific chapter about I/O operations, which is, in my opinion, the most dificult thing to do in MATLAB. Examples of I/O operations with several data formats would be useful too.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: This is a great text. Easy to read and many good examples illustrated in the book allow you to quickly pick up MATLAB, especially the GUI section. It's very clear and up-to-date. Unlike some other texts just tell you the inefficient Matlab 4.x code for the GUI programing.

*I am a undergraduate engineering student by the way.