Resources to learn more

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How can I continue learning?

Objectives

• List resources useful to continue learning

Build your community

The best way of succeeding in making a tool like MATLAB useful for your research is to start using it, and to have a community that you can rely on. Find out who uses MATLAB around you, talk to them about what they find it useful for, ask them how they learned, and ask them questions when you have them.

To learn in general about best practices for scientiffic computing check this article: Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, et al. (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001745. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745

At OSU:

Classes

CHE 581: Introduction to Numerical Methods Using MATLAB. The course is designed for graduate students (although well-prepared undergraduate students can take it too…) with minimal previous experience with programming or MATLAB. The course focuses on (1) Learning how to develop basic programming skills (using MATLAB) such as looping and decision statements, and (2) development of a suite of numerical methods and techniques that can be helpful in research. Specific topics include:

• Programming in MATLAB
• Plotting
• Numerical differentiation
• Numerical integration
• Numerical solutions to ODEs
• Finite-difference approximations for PDEs

The course is open to students across campus who are of gradate standing (or with permission). Familiarity with basic calculus, ordinary differential equations, and linear algebra will be expected.

Matlab help desk

Find information about how to get individualized help for your Matlab challenges here: https://it.engineering.oregonstate.edu/dearborn-119

Tutorials

The Department of Mathematics at OSU has three tutorials that focus on number formatting and arrays, on matrices, plots, and models, and on MATLAB specific syntax (sin, cos, rand, pi, etc.). They can be accessed through the page https://math.oregonstate.edu/mlc_matlabtutorial

Resources by Mathworks

The MATLAB help is very complete. Type help functionname if you want to learn about how to use a particular function named functionname, or search in the MATLAB documentation.

Support page from Mathworks

Getting started with MATLAB

Matlab courses

Key Points

• The more you use it the more you will learn

• Matlab help is a great tool

• Build your community