MATLAB Access

The primary programming language for our course will be MATLAB, which is commerical software for mathematical computing sold by MathWorks. You may use it in one of four ways:

• SLU has an educational license making MATLAB available in our classroom as well as most of the computer labs in MDH.

• The software is installed on the server for the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science (turing.slu.edu). It is found in the "Science & Math" portion of the start menu. We will provide you with an account on that machine. See further documentation regarding use of turing's facilities.

• A student license to install MATLAB on your personal computer can be bought for a reduced price (~$100).

• You might instead choose to install the freely-available software known as octave. Although octave is not precisely a clone of MATLAB, it was developed to be compatible with the syntax and to support many of the same libraries and graphical capabilities. octave should suffice for working on projects in this course. The most convenient site for downloading and installing octave is http://octave.sourceforge.net/.

MATLAB Documentation

• You may always type help from within the Matlab command for general advice, or help linspace for help on a specific function (e.g., linspace).

• MathWorks's official documentation
  (see especially Getting Started and Programming Fundamentals)

• A MATLAB "cheat sheet".

• A 20-page "quick reference"