title: MATLAB tutorial for programmers
body: <p>I'm getting some new students soon, who will be writing MATLAB code. They're new to MATLAB, but they have experience coding in Java and C++.</p>
  
  <p>I'm going to have them go through the <a href="http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/learn_matlab/bqr_2pl.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Getting Started</a> section of the MATLAB help. In addition, I want to give a small tutorial with the goal to prevent them from making some of the most common mistakes people make when switching to MATLAB (e.g. "MATLAB starts counting at 1"), and show them some features that they may not be aware of when coming from other languages (e.g. "you can subtract a scalar directly from an array, and for vectors, there's bsxfun").</p>
  
  <p>What are the most important things I should tell them? </p>