Learning resources

MATLAB online lets you use the software for free, which can be useful when you do not have access to the university licences.

The tutorials section on MATLAB’s site also lists useful video tutorials and examples to work through.

MATLAB Academy provides a lot of self-taught material and free courses. In particular, the Onramp program covers material similar to this course.

MATLAB cody can be a good way to keep practicing and find interesting challenges to learn how to code with MATLAB.

Glossary

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argument

A value given to a function or program when it runs. The term is often used interchangeably (and inconsistently) with parameter.

array

A collection of values saved in a single variable and accessed through an index

assign

To give a value a name by associating a variable with it.

body

(of a function): the statements that are executed when a function runs.

boolean

A type of variable to store logical values, such as 1,0 or true,false.

case-insensitive

Treating text as if upper and lower case characters of the same letter were the same. See also: case-sensitive.

case-sensitive

Treating text as if upper and lower case characters of the same letter are different. See also: case-insensitive.

comment

A remark in a program that is intended to help human readers understand what is going on, but is ignored by the computer. Comments in MATLAB start with a % character and run to the end of the line;

compose

To apply one function to the result of another, such as f(g(x)).

conditional statement

A statement in a program that might or might not be executed depending on whether a test is true or false.

comma-separated values

(CSV) A common textual representation for tables in which the values in each row are separated by commas.

default value

A value to use for a parameter if nothing is specified explicitly.

delimiter

A character or characters used to separate individual values, such as the commas between columns in a CSV file.

documentation

Human-language text written to explain what software does, how it works, or how to use it.

empty string

A character string containing no characters, often thought of as the “zero” of text.

encapsulation

The practice of hiding something’s implementation details so that the rest of a program can worry about what it does rather than how it does it.

floating-point number

A number containing a fractional part and an exponent. See also: integer.

for loop

A loop that is executed once for each value in some kind of set, list, or range. See also: while loop.

function call

A use of a function in another piece of software.

in-place operators

An operator such as += that provides a shorthand notation for the common case in which the variable being assigned to is also an operand on the right hand side of the assignment. For example, the statement x += 3 means the same thing as x = x + 3.

index

A subscript that specifies the location of a single value in a collection, such as a single element of an array.

inner loop

A loop that is inside another loop. See also: outer loop.

integer

A whole number, such as -12343. See also: floating-point number.

library

A family of code units (functions, classes, variables) that implement a set of related tasks.

loop body

The set of instructions appearing between the line with the for keyword and the line with the end keyword.

loop variable

The variable that keeps track of the progress of the loop.

outer loop

A loop that contains another loop. See also: inner loop.

parameter

A variable named in the function’s declaration that is used to hold a value passed into the call. The term is often used interchangeably (and inconsistently) with argument.

pipe

A connection from the output of one program to the input of another. When two or more programs are connected in this way, they are called a “pipeline”.

RGB

Amodel that represents colors as combinations of red, green, and blue. Each color’s value is typically in the range 0..255 (i.e., a one-byte integer).

size

An array’s dimensions, represented as a vector. For example, a 5×3 array’s size is (5,3).

slice

A regular subsequence of a larger sequence, such as the first five elements or every second element.

standard input

A process’s default input stream. In interactive command-line applications, it is typically connected to the keyboard; in a pipe, it receives data from the standard output of the preceding process.

standard output

A process’s default output stream. In interactive command-line applications, data sent to standard output is displayed on the screen; in a pipe, it is passed to the standard input of the next process.

stride

The inter-element increment of a regularly-spaced list of integers, as generated by MATLAB’s colon operator.

string

Short for “character string”, a sequence of zero or more characters.

syntax error

CHECKME: a programming error that occurs when statements are in an order or contain characters not expected by the programming language

type

The classification of objects in a program. For example, a variable’s type can be boolean, integer, array, string, among others.

while loop

A loop that keeps executing as long as some condition is true. See also: for loop.