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

Time for action - doing addition and subtraction operations


  1. 1. I have lost track of the variables! Let us start afresh and clear all variables first:

octave:66> clear
  • (Check with whos to see if we cleared everything).

  1. 2. Now, we define four variables in a single command line(!)

octave:67> a = 2; b=[1 2 3]; c=[1; 2; 3]; A=[1 2 3; 4 5 6];
  • Note that there is an important difference between the variables b and c; namely, b is a row vector, whereas c is a column vector.

  1. 3. Let us jump into it and try to add the different variables. This is done using the + character:

octave:68>a+a
ans = 4
octave:69>a+b
ans =
3 4 5
octave:70>b+b
ans =
2 4 6
octave:71>b+c
error: operator +: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 1x3, op2 is 3x1)

Note

It is often convenient to enter multiple commands on the same line. Try to test the difference in separating the commands with commas and semicolons.

What just happened?

The output from Command 68 should be clear; we add the scalar a with itself. In Command 69...