Synopsis
The first text of its kind, Stephen Chapman's best selling book on MATLAB has now been updated to reflect MATLAB 6.0. The first edition has been highly successful in engineering schools where introductory programming is taught using MATLAB rather than a traditional programming language. Although C, C++, and Java suit the needs of computer science students well, most engineering students will not be programmers by trade. Engineering students use computer tools to perform complex tasks such as scientific calculations, data analysis, simulations, and visualization: all skills students will use again in upper level classes. MATLAB provides several built in toolkits to help students accomplish these tasks, as well as an integrated devlopment environment. This book is distinctly unique from other MATLAB books in two ways. First, it is an introduction to MATLAB as a technical programming language rather than an introduction to the MATLAB environment. The author includes numerous pedagogical tools such as special boxes that highlight good programming practices, boxes that detail common pitfalls in MATLAB programming, and numerous programming exercises and examples. The book also makes wide use of MATLAB's predefined functions that provide tested solutions and time saved in writing subroutines or functions. Second, the book teaches students how to write clean, efficient, and documented programs using sound problem solving techniques. Top-down programming methodology is introduced to the students in Ch. 3 and is used consistently thoughout the rest of the book. This encourages students to think about the proper design of a program before beginning to code.
About the Author
Stephen J. Chapman received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana State University (1975), an MSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida (1979), and pursued further graduate studies at Rice University. From 1975 to 1980, he served as an officer in the U. S. Navy, assigned to teach Electrical Engineering at the U. S. Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida. From 1980 to 1982, he was affiliated with the University of Houston, where he ran the power systems program in the College of Technology. From 1982 to 1988 and from 1991 to 1995, he served as a Member of the Technical Staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, both at the main facility in Lexington, Massachusetts, and at the field site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. While there, he did research in radar signal processing systems. He ultimately became the leader of four large operational range instrumentation radars at the Kwajalein field site (TRADEX, ALTAIR, ALCOR, and MMW). From 1988 to 1991, Chapman was a research engineer at Shell Development Company in Houston, Texas, where he did seismic signal processing research. He was also affiliated with the University of Houston, where he continued to teach on a part-time basis. Mr. Chapman is currently Manager of Systems Modeling and Operational Analysis for BAE Systems Australia, in Melbourne, Australia. He is the leader of a team that has developed a model of how naval ships defend themselves. This model contains more than 400,000 lines of MATLAB code written over more than a decade. Mr. Chapman is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (and several of its component societies). He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institution of Engineers (Australia).
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