• Use this keyboard shortcut to open a Linux command line terminal (this is NOT the matlab terminal!):

 ctrl-alt-t

• Type this on the command line (the “&” is optional but handy):

 $ matlab &

or, if you are using a lab computer like uniqua:

$ sudo ls [press RETURN, enter your login password]
$ sudo matlab &

• The matlab user interface window should launch. The central pane of this window includes the command line terminal; the command line where you can type is marked by “»”. Here is a sample basic command.

 >> help cd

• The “help” command is very useful: it shows you brief documentation about any other command. You can even do “» help help”

Enjoy!

These are the tutorials that AC used to learn basic matlab syntax. These are good for people (like AC at the time) with little programming experience. They are designed to let you type single commands in the matlab terminal, where you can see for yourself what the output is.

Go to this website and follow the tutorials in the files “day1.pdf” to “day2.pdf.” Just read along and type the commands that are shown in the slides. For many of the basics (e.g. reshaping matrix variables) AC found it helpful to repeat the commands many times and to experiment with them. It is OK to skip some sections for which the lab computers are not set up (like printing).

David Touretsky's matlab tutorials

Univ. Utah matlab tutorial

Feel free to look around here:

MathWorks® list

Introductory-level video tutorials.

lynda.com Software Tutorials