Hello studyblr! This is my first masterpost, so I hope I’m doing it right… Anyway, let’s get right to the good stuff!
I am here today to tell you about a tool that will change your life. You guessed it - it’s Matlab, which stands for “matrix laboratory”. It’s a software that integrates programming, computation and visualization in a (relatively) easy to use environment. I have used Matlab in lots of my engineering courses, and also throughout the course of my internship! It’s really useful for data analysis, graphing, and solving problems involving lots of numbers… once you know how to use it, that is.
always, always, always comment your code. this will save you when you come back to look at it two days or two weeks or two months later when you can’t remember what each section of code is supposed to do.
make use of the command window! one of the things I love about matlab is that, if my script is giving funny outputs or errors, I can play around with my variables in the command window to try and figure out what’s wrong (ie. I’m not indexing an array correctly or something like that…)
give your variables meaningful names. this will be super helpful when you are writing a script (instead of scrolling back to try and figure out what the variable ‘x’ is supposed to be for, you can look at a variable named ‘average’ and know that it’s the average value of your data)
organize your projects into folders. I am really bad at this, so all my matlab files are a mess and I really should clean them up. in general, I would say a good rule is to make a folder for each project and keep all the scripts, functions and data for that project in that folder.
speaking of functions, organize your code with functions. for smaller projects, this isn’t as important, but for larger projects… this will make your life so much easier. write a main script that calls all the functions and have a function for each step in your code (ie. one function to calculate something, another function to plot the data)
I use this all the time if there’s a function or command that I’m not sure how to use. In the command window, simply type
doc [name of function or command here]
A help page will come up showing all the relevant info about how the function or command works
these commands (when typed into the command window) clear different parts of your workspace in Matlab
clc: clears all the text (ie. past commands and their outputs) from the command window
clear, clear all: deletes all the variables you currently have in your workspace
Matlab Onramp
(A free online introductory Matlab course that covers all the basics!)
Mathworks Tutorials
(For more advanced topics like signal processing, computational math & control systems)
Matlab Documentation
(Search for any Matlab function or command and you’ll get a detailed description of how the function or command works, what the input/output arguments are, etc.)
Coding Tips by @codeforvictory
Coding for Beginners by @the-studymotivation
I hope this was helpful! And as always, if you have questions, feel free to ask me.
Also, I’m thinking of making some more tutorial-style posts on using the Matlab environment and basic programming, so if that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know!
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