Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials

Learning MATLAB

I commonly am asked how to learn MATLAB. Here are common questions and answers. What MATLAB books or MATLAB tutorials should I use?

I am, of course biased on this. I think this blog is a great place to start. Look over at the categories list on the side. Start with Basic, or a specific category of interest like GUI or GUIDE.

Stuart has put together a nice intro to MATLAB, and there are plenty of related videos on this site to watch.

I would also look to Cody. I would go through the problems doing the ones that are solved by the most people already. Those are going to be the easier ones. I would not consider the best scoring entries as the best entries, as they are trying to be the lowest complexity in the parse tree. This is a nice place to try a bunch of ‘homework’ problems though.

If you are more interested in books, then the Mastering MATLAB series is great.

This is the book I wish I would have had as I was defining my coding style in MATLAB. Elements of MATLAB style helps you make decisions about how your code should look, what variable names to use, etc. It defines a system for making lots of little decisions so your code will be a coherent whole.

If you are willing to put in the work to make your MATLAB questions well formed, intelligent and show you have tried to answer the problem yourself, then MATLAB Answers will be a great resource. There are plenty of MATLAB users that read this site and are glad to help you.

I think it is entirely possible to give yourself a great education in MATLAB with these resources. They are decentralized, there is not a straightforward path of “Do this, then this”. It more like a chaotic sea of MATLAB information. My question to you, would you like a more straight forward course developed?

One Response to “Learning MATLAB”

1. Mayowa replied on :

Hi Doug,

Personally I feel the best resource to learn MATLAB is to read the MATLAB documentation and follow the examples therein.
In addition to the books mentioned, “MATLAB Primer Timothy A. Davis” is a good book as well as “Matlab, Second Edition: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving, Stormy Attaway”.

Lastly “Experiments with MATLAB, Clive Moler” is an excellent read for beginners.

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Doug Hull is a proud MathWorker who is on a mission to help you with MATLAB.

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of MathWorks.