Product Review
This book is intended to serve as an introductory guide to Matlab for people who have never programmed before. There's a vast amount of free information available on the internet about programming in Matlab. However, if you have never programmed before, it can be difficult to know where to start without getting overwhelmed. This book walks you through some basic commands and concepts in Matlab, which you will use most of the time even when writing fairly complicated programs. A simple, but general approach towards programming is adopted in the book. There's a strong focus on learning to translate problem statements into algorithm and code. The author's hope is that the material discussed in the book will get you to the point where you are comfortable with the idea of exploring more involved concepts on your own.
This book may not be right for you if you have already taken introductory courses in computing, and are comfortable writing simple programs in Matlab, C, C++, Fortran, or any of the several other programming languages.
About the Author:
The author received his Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 2006, where he dabbled in the dark arts (experimental research) for a couple of years. The fact that he had used Matlab to control supersonic wind-tunnel experiments made the author decide to figure out what computational physics was all about! Soon, he got hooked on the idea of solving strange, uncooperative mathematical equations using some of the best supercomputers in the world. A hasty (and surprisingly painful) Master’s degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2010, followed by a delightfully wonderful four-year-long Doctorate degree, gave him ample opportunity to tinker around with elegant numerical algorithms and colossal supercomputers. It is the author’s sincere hope that after reading this short book, you too might get infected by the computing bug, and go on to do wonderful things for the planet!
