Title: for computationally intensive tasks
Review: There's a lot here. Matlab has grown tremendously, and the authors give a comprehensive walkthrough of Version 7. It is directed at the programmer who might want to perform intensive computations. The Matlab scripting language is explained, as a powerful way to store a sequence of commands in a scripting file. For many practical uses, M-files are the way to go. It is how you store your Matlab expertise, so to speak.The chapter on matrix algebra shows powerful tools for matrix manipulations. Useful for many types of linear systems analysis.Now, you can even tie Matlab into actual programming languages. From a C or Fortran program, you can invoke Matlab, and vice versa. While there are also ways to run Matlab and access Java class files.But if you want symbolic algebra capabilities, I suggest you learn Mathematica. That was the latter's original forte and is still its core strength. Whereas Matlab was always about pure number crunching.
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