An introduction to matlab

MATLAB, short for Matrix Laboratory, is a simple and flexible programming environment for a wide range of problems such as signalprocessing, optimization, linear programming and so on. The basic MATLAB software package can be extended by using add-on toolboxes.Examples of such toolboxes are: Signal Processing, Filter Design, Statistics and Symbolic Math.

Comprehensive documentation for MATLAB is available at Mathworks.com . In particular, an excellent (extensive) getting started guide is available at Getting started with MATLAB . There is also a very active newsgroup for MATLAB related questions, comp.soft-sys.matlab

MATLAB is an interpreted language. This implies that the source code is not compiled but interpreted on the fly. This is both an advantage and adisadvantage. MATLAB allows for easy numerical calculation and visualization of the results without the need for advanced and timeconsuming programming. The disadvantage is that it can be slow, especially when bad programming practices are applied.