Michael Paluszek - MATLAB Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2nd Edition

Writing software has become part of the job description for nearly every professional engineer and engineering student. While there are many excellent prebuilt software applications for engineers, almost everyone can benefit by writing custom software for their own problems.

MATLAB had its origins for that very reason. Scientists that needed to do operations on matrices used numerical software written in FORTRAN. At the time, using computer languages required the user to go through the write-compile-link-execute process that was time-consuming and error-prone. MATLAB presented the user with a scripting language that allowed the user to solve many problems with a few lines of a script that executed instantaneously. MATLAB had built-in visualization tools that helped the user better understand the results. Writing MATLAB was a lot more productive and fun than writing FORTRAN.

MATLAB has grown greatly since those days. The power of the basic MATLAB software has grown dramatically, and hundreds of MATLAB libraries are now available, both commercially and as open source. MATLAB is so sophisticated that most new users only use a fraction of its power.

The goal of MATLAB Recipes is to help all users harness the power of MATLAB. This book has two parts. The first part, Chapters 1 through 5, gives a framework that you can use to write high-quality MATLAB code that you, your colleagues, and possibly your customers can utilize. We cover coding practices, graphics, debugging, and other topics in a problem-solution format. You can read these sections from cover to cover or just look at the recipes that interest you and use them in your latest MATLAB code.

The second part of the book, Chapters , shows complete MATLAB applications revolving around the control of and simulation of dynamical systems. Each chapter provides the technical background for the topic, ideas on how you can write a simple control system, and an example of how you might simulate the system. Each system is implemented in a MATLAB script supported by a number of MATLAB functions. Each chapter also highlights a general MATLAB topic, like graphics or writing graphical user interfaces (GUIs). We have deliberately made the control systems simple so that the reader wont need a course in control theory to get results. Control experts can easily take the script and implement their own ideas. We cover a number of areas, ranging from chemical processes to satellites and we apologize if we didnt write an example for your area of interest!

The book has something for everyone from the MATLAB novice to the authors of commercial MATLAB packages. We learned new things writing this book! We hope that you enjoy the book and look forward to seeing your software that it inspires.