Book Reviews

Tobin A. Driscoll, Learning Matlab, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, USA, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-898716-83-2, XIV+97 pp.

This book is a short introduction to the fundamentals of Matlab.

The first chapter presents some elementary notions regarding the use of Matlab (basic commands and syntax). Chapter 2 deals with arrays and matrices: how to build them, to refer their elements and to make elementary operations. The scripts and functions are described in Chapters 3 and 4: function handles and anonymous functions, subfunctions and nested functions, input/output arguments, as well as conditionals and loops. Some elementary aspects regarding the graphics are presented in the following chapter: commands for one or multidimensional data plots, annotations, handles and properties, color, saving and exporting techniques. In Chapter 6 are introduced some more advanced techniques and tips: memory preallocation, vectorization, masking, scoping exceptions, as well as some descriptions of strings, cell arrays and data structures. The last chapter briefly presents some common tasks in scientific computing and their solving with Matlab.

Compared to other introductory books dealing with Matlab, this book has the distinctive feature of being concise. This turns out to be an important advantage over the books containing exhaustive technical material, when the readers are looking for a quick tour on the essentials of Matlab. Moreover, each chapter contains examples and exercises (from straightforward to challenging) which help the reader to understand the common and more sophisticated techniques or features.

The book is well written, reflecting the author’s long experience in teaching Matlab.

Emil Cătinaş