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

Loading your work


Let us see how one can load the variable(s) stored in a file. First, we clear the workspace to be sure that we actually load the variable prime_sequence stored in the file primes.mat:

octave:46> clear; whos
octave:47> load primes.mat
octave:48> whos
Variables in the current scope:
Attr Name size Bytes Class
==== ==== ==== ===== =====
prime_sequence 1x1385 11080 double

Notice that Octave treats the numbers as doubles, since we have not explicitly told it otherwise.

The general syntax for load is:

load option1 option2 filename

where the options are the same as above for the save command. For example, to load the data stored in the ascii file primes.dat, we can use:

octave:49> load ascii primes.dat
octave:50> whos
Variables in the current scope:
Attr Name size Bytes Class
==== ==== ==== ===== =====
prime_sequence 1x1385 11080 double
primes 1x1385 11080 double

Notice that when loading an ascii file like we did in Command 49, Octave will create a variable called...