18.311 Rodolfo R. Rosales. MatLab Help.	MIT, Spring 2013. Back to 18.311 home page.
Below a list of some of the places where help on how to use MatLab can be found. I cannot vouch for the links given here currency. Last time I checked them all was on December 03, 2010. A) The MatLab manuals, tutorial and help are quite good. Check them out! Information as to how to access the on-line MatLab help shows up on the command window as soon as you start MatLab. The three basic commands in MatLab that you should always remeber are: lookfor. If you want to do something in MatLab, but have no idea of how to do it, nor what command to employ, the thing to do is to USE lookfor, as in (for example): >> lookfor plot (here >> is the MatLab prompt). This will list all the MatLab commands where the word plot shows up somewhere in their docs. Most of them will be useless to you at any given time, but the ones you need (if any) will be listed. Once you have the names of a few commands that look as if they may do what you need, you can switch to help (see next). help. If you have a command name, but are not sure of how to use it, ">> help command_name" will tell you how to. helpdesk. This brings up the html help window, where an enourmous amount of easy to access help is available. B) Matlab on the Athena web page at:   http://web.mit.edu/matlab/www/home.html. Also, Athena offers Minicourse on Matlab once in a while. C)Tutorial by Dr. Kermit Sigmon at the University of Florida at:   http://math.ucsd.edu/~driver/21d-s99/matlab-primer.html. D)Introductory notes provided by Indiana University at:   http://www.indiana.edu/~statmath/math/matlab/. Ignore the Indiana-specific information. E)A Practical Introduction to MATLAB (by Mark S. Gockenbach) is available at:   http://www.math.mtu.edu/~msgocken/intro/intro.html. These notes are a good starting point. The section on "Simple calculations and graphs" is particularly appropriate for help in getting started.