Book Image

GNU Octave Beginner's Guide

By : Jesper Schmidt Hansen
Book Image

GNU Octave Beginner's Guide

By: Jesper Schmidt Hansen

Overview of this book

Today, scientific computing and data analysis play an integral part in most scientific disciplines ranging from mathematics and biology to imaging processing and finance. With GNU Octave you have a highly flexible tool that can solve a vast number of such different problems as complex statistical analysis and dynamical system studies.The GNU Octave Beginner's Guide gives you an introduction that enables you to solve and analyze complicated numerical problems. The book is based on numerous concrete examples and at the end of each chapter you will find exercises to test your knowledge. It's easy to learn GNU Octave, with the GNU Octave Beginner's Guide to hand.Using real-world examples the GNU Octave Beginner's Guide will take you through the most important aspects of GNU Octave. This practical guide takes you from the basics where you are introduced to the interpreter to a more advanced level where you will learn how to build your own specialized and highly optimized GNU Octave toolbox package. The book starts by introducing you to work variables like vectors and matrices, demonstrating how to perform simple arithmetic operations on these objects before explaining how to use some of the simple functionality that comes with GNU Octave, including plotting. It then goes on to show you how to write new functionality into GNU Octave and how to make a toolbox package to solve your specific problem. Finally, it demonstrates how to optimize your code and link GNU Octave with C and C++ code enabling you to solve even the most computationally demanding tasks. After reading GNU Octave Beginner's Guide you will be able to use and tailor GNU Octave to solve most numerical problems and perform complicated data analysis with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
GNU Octave
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Customizing Octave


When the Octave interpreter starts, it reads several configuration files. These files can be changed in order to add system paths, the appearance of the Octave command prompt, how the editor behaves, and much more. The changes can be global and affect all users of Octave that run on a particular computer. They can be targeted to work with a specific version of Octave, a specific project, or a user. This is especially useful on multi-user platforms, such as GNU/Linux.

The configuration files are named either octaverc or .octaverc, depending on where they are located and how the configurations affect Octave. They basically consist of a sequence of Octave commands, so you can also give the same commands to the interpreter from the Octave prompt. This can be a good way to test new configurations before implementing them in your octaverc or .octaverc files.

The names octaverc and .octaverc are, of course, not supported by MATLAB. However, most commands are. It is therefore just a matter of copying the content of the octave configuration files into MATLAB's startup.m file.

Under Windows, the user does not have a home directory equivalent to the home directory under GNU/Linux. I therefore recommend that you create a home directory for Octave. You can then command Octave to go to this directory and look for your configuration file here, whenever you start the interpreter.

If you are using GNU/Linux you can skip the following "Time for action" section.