Lesson 1: 1. Introduction (Old version) - MATLAB Video Lecture | Introduction to Programming with MATLAB - IT & Software

[MUSIC]
Welcome to Computer
Programming with MATLAB.
This is lesson one,
Introduction to MATLAB.
My name is Mike Fitzpatrick, and
I'm coming to you from Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, Tennessee.
I'll be your lead instructor, and
I'll be supported by Akos Ledeczi and
Robert Tairas.
All three of us are on the faculty
of Vanderbilt's School of Engineering.
And we've put together a course whose purpose
is to teach computer programming to people
who have little or
no experience with programming.
The level of the course equals that of
an introductory, first-year college course.
The length is nine weeks, which includes
eight weeks of video lectures and
one week for a final homework submission.
If you follow along with us, try all
the examples that you see step by step on
the screen, take the quizzes, and
do the homework,
then at the end of these nine weeks,
you'll be able to program a computer.
You'll be good at it, and
you should have fun doing it.
To program a computer,
you have to use a programming language.
The first languages were complicated
affairs of strings of ones and zeroes,
of cryptic code words and numbers.
And then in 1954, all that changed.
A language was invented that was
much more like a human language.
It was called FORTRAN.
Its purpose was to make
programming easier, especially for
solving numerical problems.
Since then, hundreds of such
languages have been developed.
And in the 1970s,
a new wave of them began.
The most successful of these were C,
C++, Java, and C#.
And they're still heavily used languages.
They're used especially for
writing very large programs, by which
I mean programs with hundreds of thousands
or millions of statements in them.
These programs are the "shrinkwrapped"
products used by non-programmers,
things like word processors,
spreadsheets, web browsers, games,
operating systems, and the like.
In the midst of this new wave,
another language appeared called MATLAB.
And that's the language we're
going to use in this course.
MATLAB's purpose was to make
programming easier, especially for
solving numerical problems.
But you may have noticed that was
exactly the purpose of FORTRAN.
So, have we come full circle?
No, because MATLAB is far
easier to program than FORTRAN.
I know.
I've used them both.
So where did MATLAB come from?
Well, it sprang from the mind of
one person, an expert in FORTRAN,
by the way, named Cleve Moler.
Professor Moler was teaching students
at the University of New Mexico
to solve numerical problems with FORTRAN.
And they were spending way too much
trouble struggling with the language.
So, he invented MATLAB.
And it soon became so popular that Moler
teamed up with an engineer outside
academics named Jack Little to form a
company to make it available to the world.
They named the company the MathWorks.
It was formed in California in 1984 and
it had one product, MATLAB.
Well, that company is alive and
well today in Natick,
Massachusetts 3,000 miles from California.
And today, it has 100 products,
all based on MATLAB, and
over 1 million users worldwide.
And it's taught in 5,000
universities, including Vanderbilt.
MATLAB is clearly having
a big impact on the world.
In 2012, the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers
recognized that impact by giving Dr.
Moler its Computer Pioneer Award.
They give this award out once a year.
And they named it for improving
the quality of mathematical software,
making it more accessible,
and creating MATLAB.
And that brings us to this course.
Computer programming with MATLAB is our
effort to add to the impact of Moler's
creation by using it to make computer
programming more accessible to you.
There's no required textbook for this
course, but there is a recommended one.
As you can see, the title is
the same as that of the course.
And Akos Ledeczi and I are the authors.
So it's no surprise that it's
the one we're recommending.
This is an ebook, no paper is involved.
It's been used at Vanderbilt since 2013,
and
previous versions of it
were used since 2000.
The book is organized
into three major parts,
which in the iBook style
are called chapters.
This course covers Chapter One and Two.
The remaining chapter, Three, covers
subjects that are beyond the scope of this
course,
but you'll be able to continue
through that chapter on your own after
you've completed this course.
The book is available online at cs103.net.
You'll find two versions there:
an iBook for
Apple's iPads and Macs, and
a PDF for any other device.
And it costs $9.99 each.
To make our textbook and
our course more effective,
we approach MATLAB programming as part
of the discipline of computer science.
Computer scientists have spent over 50
years developing a concise set of concepts
and a consistent vocabulary to describe
all aspects of computer programming.
And in both this book and this course,
we use those concepts and
that vocabulary to introduce
you to computer programming.
This approach will give you an idea
of how computer scientists think, and
it'll make it a lot
easier to learn MATLAB.
Well, let's take a look at the iBook.
I'm going to show it on this MacBook here,
but the iPad has the same features.
The only difference is that
instead of clicking a mouse,
you touch the screen on the iPad.
So after you've purchased it and
downloaded it,
it should be in your iBooks collection.
Let's find it here.
There it is,
I've got it under Computer Programming.
And if we double-click it, it opens up,
and then it takes you to this page.
Now we see down at the bottom
a scrollable list of pages.
There's pages at the front,
here's the Preface,
here's Getting Started,
Procedural Programing, Advanced Concepts.
I'm not going to click on those.
I'm going to go up here and
click this table of contents here.
Let's click this little arrow
next to Getting Started.
This is chapter one.
And we see section one of chapter one and
two,
Introduction to MATLAB,
Matrices and Operators.
We'll spend a lot of time near
the beginning of this course right here in
Matrices and Operators.
So let's go there.
At the bottom, we see we're on page 33.
Let's go to page 34.
You look around here, you'll notice
some lowercase words in blue type.
If we click one of these,
let's click Matrix, we see a definition.
A two-dimensional rectangular
arrangement of numbers,
also known as a two-dimensional array.
And there's two links.
One says Glossary; one says Dictionary.
Let's click the Glossary.
That's the glossary of this book.
And these are the, you might say, official
definitions that will help you the most
as study aids when you're trying
to understand programing.
And here's a link that takes
you to the first occurrence or
the defining occurrence of the term in
the text, right back here where we were.
There are other special study aids,
including setting bookmarks.
Just click at the top up here,
right on that little bookmark icon.
It turns red, indicating that
this page is now bookmarked.
Let's bookmark a few more pages.
I'll go forward a bit and
bookmark this one.
And maybe we're done.
Now if you go up here and
click on this little arrow just
to the right of the bookmark,
you see a list of your bookmarks.
41, 37, let's go to 37, okay?
Let's go to 34.
Hm, that's where we started.
Highlighting and
annotating are both easy too.
Just click and hold the mouse while
you slide over what you want.
And maybe I wanted to put a note.
I want to try this in MATLAB.
And down here,
I'm going to highlight that in pink.
To see all your highlights and
annotations collected together,
click up here at the top of
the window on this page icon here.
The section called Notes shows up.
They're exactly the two highlights we just
did, and it shows what page they're on.
If you want to delete one of these,
you just go to the one you want to delete,
click on it.
You can remove the whole thing or
remove part of it.
One last standard iBook
study feature is found by
clicking the Study button
up here on the left corner.
It'll give you the annotations like that.
You can click here,
then we get to glossary terms.
Flip the card and
it tells you the definition.
And you can go to one after the other and,
and try them.
Clicking Done will get
us back to the book.
And if you want to close
the Notes section,
just click this little page icon again,
and it's gone.
Okay, that's a look at generic iBook study
features, but there's one essential study
technique that we've left out, practicing
what you're learning by working problems.
Let's go to the table of contents again.
And Loops.
Let's click Practice Problems down here.
There, and
you see these little question marks here.
Well, those are where the answers are.
So for example, problem 21 over here,
if I click this little question mark,
I find the answer.
I'll close that.
There's one last thing I want to
show you about the iBook.
It includes animation.
Somewhere in this book is an example
called surface plot animation.
Well, up here in the right corner,
we see a little search icon.
Let's click that.
I'm going to search for
that surface plot animation.
Hey, it showed up right there.
Let's go there.
There's a play button here.
Let's click that.
Now that's kind of cool.
Okay.
Enough with the preliminaries,
it's time to get down to business here.
After you've picked the textbook and
downloaded it, downloaded MATLAB and
installed it on your computer,
you're ready to go.
So what's next?
Let's run MATLAB.
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