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

Two-dimensional plotting


In the second part of this chapter, we will discuss how you can make plots with Octave. Since version 3.0.0, the Octave development team has done a lot to improve the plotting interface in order to obtain larger compatibility with MATLAB. At the same time, the plotting programs have improved significantly, and the plotting facilities have now become quite impressive. Depending on the Octave version you are using, the plotting program may not support all the plotting commands and facilities that we will go through here. Also, the graphical output may be different.

Note

From version 3.4.0, Octave has a built-in native plotting program based on the Fast Light Toolkit4 (FLTK), but the default plotting program will likely be gnuplot. Therefore, if you have Octave version 3.4.0 or higher installed with the FLTK plotting backend, you can load and change the default plotting toolkit to FLTK by using:

octave:1>graphics_toolkit("fltk")

To change back to gnuplot:

octave:2&gt...