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

About the Reviewers

Piotr Gawron is a researcher in the field of quantum information processing. His main research topics are quantum programming languages, quantum game theory, and numerical and geometrical methods in quantum information. He works in the Quantum Computer Systems Group of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gliwice, Poland. Apart from research in theoretical aspects of computer science, he has gained practical experience in FPGA development and real-time image processing for applications in UAVs working closely with the industry. He is administrator of www.quantiki.org , a portal for the quantum information community. He is a user and strong supporter of free software. He likes hard science-fiction literature, live-action role-playing, and French rock music.

Kenneth Geisshirt is a chemist by education and a geek by nature. He has been programming for more than 25 years—the last 6 years as a subcontractor. In 1990, Kenneth first met free software, and in 1992 turned to Linux as his primary operating system (officially Linux user no. 573 at the Linux Counter). He has written books about Linux, PAM, and JavaScript—and many articles on open source software for computer magazines. Moreover, Kenneth has been a technical reviewer of books on Linux network administration, the Vim editor, and JavaScript testing.

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso studied mathematics in Canada and Mexico, both pure and applied respectively. He has been programming since the age of seven, when he started to learn about computers while writing silly programs in BASIC. He has been a Debian user since 2001, his first and still preferred GNU/Linux distribution, to which he now occasionally contributes with GNU Octave packaging. Since 2005, he has been an enthusiastic Octave user and started getting more involved with its development in 2010. As of 2011, he resides in Mexico and works in BlueMessaging, where he's responsible for natural language processing and artificial intelligence. An Emacs user at heart, Jordi feels at home in a GNU environment and will gladly share .emacs configurations with anyone who asks.