18.376 Rosales.
MatLab Help.
MIT, Spring 2023.
Back to 18.376 home page.

Below you can find a list of some of the places where help on how to use MatLab can be found.   I cannot vouch for the currency of the links here.   Last time I checked them all was on September 06, 2010.

A)
The MatLab manuals, tutorial and help are quite good.

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 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 at MIT : MatLab minicourses are offered once in a while. Examples in ocw:
6.057 (January IAP 2019) Introduction to MATLAB. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-057-introduction-to-matlab-january-iap-2019/
18.S997 (Fall 2011) Introduction To MATLAB Programming. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s997-introduction-to-matlab-programming-fall-2011/


C)
Tutorial by Dr. Kermit Sigmon at the University of Florida:   http://math.ucsd.edu/~driver/21d-s99/matlab-primer.html.


D)
A Practical Introduction to MATLAB (by Mark S. Gockenbach):   https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~deloera/TEACHING/MATH160/matint.pdf.
These notes are a good starting point. The section on "Simple calculations and graphs" is particularly appropriate for help in getting started.