Page 15 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

xiv Preface

Why We Wrote This Book

The goal of this book is to get you started using MATLAB successfully and
quickly. We point out the parts of MATLAB you need to know without over-
whelming you with details. We help you avoid the rough spots. We give you
examples of real uses of MATLAB that you can refer to when you’re doing
your own work. And we provide a handy reference to the most useful features
of MATLAB. When you’re finished reading this book, you will be able to use
MATLAB effectively. You’ll also be ready to explore more of MATLAB on your
own.
You might not be a MATLAB expert when you finish this book, but you
will be prepared to become one — if that’s what you want. We figure you’re
probably more interested in being an expert at your own specialty, whether
that’s finance, physics, psychology, or engineering. You want to use MATLAB
the way we do, as a tool. This book is designed to help you become a proficient
MATLAB user as quickly as possible, so you can get on withthe business at
hand.

Who Should Read This Book

This book will be useful to complete novices, occasional users who want to
sharpen their skills, intermediate or experienced users who want to learn
about the new features of MATLAB 6 or who want to learn how to use
SIMULINK, and even experts who want to find out whether we know any-
thing they don’t.
You can read through this guide to learn MATLAB on your own. If your
employer (or your professor) has plopped you in front of a computer with
MATLAB and told you to learn how to use it, then you’ll find the book par-
ticularly useful. If you are teaching or taking a course in which you want to
use MATLAB as a tool to explore another subject — whether in mathematics,
science, engineering, business, or statistics — this book will make a perfect
supplement.
As mentioned, we wrote this guide for use with MATLAB 6. If you plan
to continue using MATLAB 5, however, you can still profit from this book.
Virtually all of the material on MATLAB commands in this book applies to
bothversions. Only a small amount of material on the MATLAB interface,
found mainly in Chapters 1, 3, and 8, is exclusive to MATLAB 6.