Is Matlab worth it?

>>8502209
What kind of negineer? U can be chemical engineeer, automation engineer, automative enginerr, electricla engineer, mechanical.. etc

If you plan on going into research then matlab is almost essential.

>>8502209
How would we know, it depends entirely on what you like and want. MATLAB is without doubt a useful and complete software package for simulations and all kinds of numerical calculations. It's fast, it's mature and it's very efficient. Looking at some ends of it, there is really no alternative that comes close.

But all that depends on where you want to go and what you are interested in, we can't know that.

>>8502209
You will have to provide some extra info on what field you plan on studying. Different fields require different tools.

>>8502214
I am a mechanical engineer sophomore. I've already had an intro to programming class where we used Matlab for everything and I know some of what I'm doing.

>>8502224
Usually Mechanical engineers are required to learn by heart some CAD system. But yes matlab si good also. At least for start.

But i suggest making love with the Documentation on a CAD system.. like DraftSight (if you need something free)

>>8502228
Yes we've done a lot already with Solidworks and AutoCAD programs so I'm familiar, but in terms of programming and working with code, I suppose more MatLab practice wouldn't hurt

>>8502233
Knock yourself out. It is useful in simulation and design.:)

>>8502234
I'll try to switch over to the Matlab class, thanks /sci/ anons

Learn Python & Fortran, live fast, die young

>>8502241
Python has its uses in science, but for engineers it's essentially useless.

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Us Octave

>>8502251
Depends entirely on the field. I know plenty of engineers that use it.

>>8502251
Not necessarily true.
Nowdays it's almost on par with Matlab for prototyping.

Matlab is a wonderful tool, but it's both closed source and horribly expensive, so you need to make up your mind before starting with either of those.

>>8502274
Luckily my uni offers bomb ass deals on Matlab so I'll be good to go I think

>>8502274
>he doesn't get free software licenses from his university

>>8502209
It is useful for prototyping and simulation in most branches of science and engineering. Not as useful for implementation or application development.

So it completely depends on if you want to be good at prototyping algorithms and theories or implementing them.

>>8502274
>Nowdays it's almost on par with Matlab for prototyping.
Prototyping is not why you buy MATLAB though. MATLAB's real strength is the amazing software that comes with it, simulation tools and analysis tools.

>>8502359
But it comes with almost nothing, you have to pay extra for each toolbox.

>>8502209
Take the mathematical course so you gain the right to shit on random anons and call them brainlets.

>>8502369
If I want something from the MATLAB toolboxes my university just buys it for me. It happened only once, but money is not a problem.

>>8502209
you are a massive faggot
every engineer needs to be a high level matlab coder
many engineers spend their careers being matlab programmers
most of you engineering courses will require significant matlab coding for the homework

>>8502374
I highly recommend this.

>is learning something to pad your resume with worth your time

Looks good on your resumee so definitly go for it. If you have the opportunity to learn R or Python as well, do that too.

>>8502251
It is good to know a general purpose language. Python is easy and fun to learn.

>>8502375
>Money is not a problem.
Maybe not for you and for your specific university. But that is definitely not the same for everyone.

>>8502209
>>8502224
>I am a mechanical engineer sophomore. I've already had an intro to programming class where we used Matlab for everything and I know some of what I'm doing.

My school had a computerize version of the intro matrix algebra class too and it was pointless. A few assignments were plugging in the bare basic stuff into Matlab that engineers already knew how to do. And we ended up not covering a few topics like Cramer's rule that we should have because we wasted time with Matlab.

Just take the "mathematical aspect" version, then take the applied linear algebra class (which covers Least-Squares, QR, SVD, LDU, Schur, DFT, etc) and numerical linear algebra class (at the level of Golub or Trefethen). ALA and NLA were graduate courses at my school but they are really worthwhile for when you get into the real world.

>>8502209
Post the syllabi or we won't be able to advise you.

>>8502890
Cramers rule is in most engineering contexts a much bigger waste of time compared to learning a language able to do numerical linear algebra.

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>>8502274
>Matlab is a wonderful tool
>but it's both closed source and horribly expensive
>horribly expensive
>horribly expensive

>>8502928
A few years ago I think it was about 3000 dollars for a commercial license without any tool boxes. And then add 1500 for each toolbox. Nothing a poor student can afford. Sure if you are a large company or get venture capital investments or something like that then it's not much.

>>8502935
You misunderstand me, have you ever heard of torrents?

>>8502935
Most schools offer licenses to the students

>>8502907
He already learnt matlab. All he's doing is wasting time relearning a small portion of it.

You have to learn MATLAB either case and it helps either case.

>>8502947
Fun fact: at some point in time you stop being a student, and you have to pay for it.
That's why it's free for the students in the first place.

>>8502945
I don't know what kind of fancy tracker you're using, but there's no way in hell you can find all toolboxes you need in piratebay or something.
Not to mention the possibility of infecting your work machine and risk losing all your files to some shitty cryptovirus.

>>8503131
>Fun fact: at some point in time you stop being a student, and you have to pay for it.

No.

>>8503131
>I don't know what kind of fancy tracker you're using, but there's no way in hell you can find all toolboxes you need in piratebay or something.

Pretty much all matlab torrents have all the toolboxes.

>Not to mention the possibility of infecting your work machine and risk losing all your files to some shitty cryptovirus.

Virtualbox nigger.

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>>8503131
>"and you have to pay for it."
ahahahahahahahaha

i bet you bought the textbooks for all of your courses, too

>"there's no way in hell you can find all toolboxes you need in piratebay or something."
pic related: every component that comes with the installer

>"Not to mention the possibility of infecting your work machine and risk losing all your files to some shitty cryptovirus."
Literally has not been a problem for any pirate anywhere since 2008

MATLAB is pretty dank

It's really good at doing what it's designed to do, matrix and vectorized computation.

Also there are software packages for literally every engineering/science application you can think of

As a general purpose language it sucks dick. Try dealing with a file system, or manipulating strings. Yucky.

>>8503131
Funner Fact: I graduated 5 years ago and I can still re-up my student license every year.

>he needs matlab to visualize equations
loool

high level math is legit useless for 90% of engineers.
unless you're going to be designing models or working with fluids or something you'll barely even use calculus.

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>>8502209
I had a matlab course in my engineering curriculum, it was pretty easy but very useful for other subjects, you can make some pretty cool visualizations once you get the hang of it.

>>8503742
how?

>>8503771
Fuck if I know. I just log in to MathWorks every summer, click the update license button, and it keeps working.

>>8503148
virtualbox for computationally intensive tasks require monster hardware.

>>8503753
You can calculate how to produce stuff better, optimize production in factories, routing in computer networks, resource allocation, logistics, planning, computer graphics, images, audio, music, video media, 3D models are very popular now with 3D printing and Virtual Reality slowly starting to become an everyday thing.

It's more like if you don't know it you won't know what you could have used it for.

>>8504903
Robotics, copters, artificial intelligence, machine learning, special effects in entertainment, media technology, advertisements, data mining, cognitive and behavioural analysis for spy organizations. The list goes on.

>>8502209
Matlab is suuuuuper useful in research. But learn the pure mathematical aspect first. Applying it can be self taught in a week.

>>8504812

Hardware based virtualization acceleration is a thing now

>>8502209
Linear algebra is the easiest math class you will ever take

>vector stuff
>matrix stuff
>find the determinate
>eigen value
>eigen vectors
>reply to this or
>your mother will
>die in her sleep
>Jacobian

>>8504956
yes you are right. touché.

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>>8503131
>at some point in time you stop being a student, and you have to pay for it.
do I really?

Python can do literally everything MATLAB can
>numpy for fast C-based array computing
>matplotlib for making plots
>scipy for tons of tools and methods in science
>use spyder as an IDE like MATLAB has

also it's FREE
MATLAB is expensive as fuck

Python can be used for many things
MATLAB can only do the tihng it was made to do

>>8505081
Only a fool would use python for a large project.

t. C++, matlab, and python user

>>8503131
But at that point in time you supposedly have learned it well enough to switch to Gnu Octave and write your own stuff independently of flashy indian-spyking-aweinspiring hacks they spurt out lately.

>>8505081
But there exists Octave which is a free open source rewrite of Matlab.

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>>8505089
>Free
>GNU

pick one

>>8504959
OP here. I'm in a class titled "Advanced Math for Engineers and Scientists" and we've already covered matrices, determinants, cofactor expansions, eigenvalues/eigenvectors and all of that jazz. The computational linear algebra course covers basically all of that and then maybe some other stuff where the Mathematical Linear Algebra covers this stuff and much more. So maybe I'll stay in the math class so I can learn more.

It sounds like MATLAB is essential for the future and it should be easy to apply my linear algebra to it so I think I'll be fine in that regard.

I took a linear algebra/mathematical methods course this semester and since the professor teaching us was a math major and not a CS major we had nearly 0 programming on MatLab. I used Scilab btw bec open source. Try using scilab for the moment if you're on the fence

>>8505445
Yeh, like I mentioned I have taken a class already where we learned all of the essentials of MATLAB and I think I can get it for free through the uni so I can learn the applications once I know the linear algebra

>>8502209

matlab is cool

>>8505436

Would you mind telling us what school you're going to?

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>>8505556
University of Vermont :^)

>>8505561
What a joke. Glad I didn't go there.
-t. Vermonter

>>8505561
Oh wow, they don't even have a second semester linear algebra course.

>>8505721
Yeh it wasn't my first choice so I settled. Yanno, the same old story

>>8505843
Yeh, but my senior year is full of elective slots and I'm currently in a math minor so I'll be filling those with math and engineering electives.

Unless I transfer, but yanno, that's a problem for future me

>>8505100
>Still buying into the communism meme.

Oh my gawd. Well yes GNU is not perfect, but it is lots of more free than proprietary licences.

>>8505938

It's unfree (and marxist) in that you're not entitled to your own work. You should publish all you code in copy-center licence like BSD/Apache/Academic Free License.

>>8505959
>literarly doesn't understand what 'free' in the context of software means

How's that edgy contraniarism treating ya?

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>>8505983
>literally doesn't understand what GPL does

>>8505983
>If we keep repeating the mantra ""free as in freedom"" it becomes true.

Most /g/nu/tards speak as if free software was like a free bike where BSD is like anyone is free to take it and it's gone and theirs now, while GPL is like a shared bike that you return "in better condition than you found it" when you're done with it and protects community property. But this is fundamentally wrong.

When people download and use a piece of code, it doesn't magically makes it disappear off the face of the internet and needs to be replenished by uploading it once more with your changes. What GPL does in this analogy is that you're free to take this bike but you can now only use our brand replacement tire, use only our brand bike pumps, use only our brand bike racks, use only our brand bike lanes, only associate with others riding on our brand bikes, or you will be sued for every dime. BSD is what you expect from a free bike, you're free to use and modify the bike anyway you want. The only restrictions and terms are the obvious CYA ones: if you fall and hurt/kill yourself or others then we're not liable, if you break something or it doesn't work then there is no warranty, and you must be upfront that you got it from us.

>>8505992
>shit normal people don't care about
we're talking about software for scientific computing
who gives a shit if some fat fa/g/got doesn't consider it "free"

>>8505081
Matplotlib makes disgusting graphs and python is even more of a train wreck of a language than Matlab is.

If you want scientific computing that's not Matlab and you choose any interpreted language that's not R them you fucked up.

Any good book for learning MATLAB? Or is it something that even a website can cover fully?

total computer indentured peasants here
how do I program? in doing engineering and physics. i have SciLab because poor af but I don't know how to use it and haven't had a class on numerical methods and so on.
should I get that uh phyton thing? i dont think I'll do ambitious stuff with it.

>>8506491
Python is a good place to start. Ask on /g/'s DPT about books to read

>>8506434
Are you seriously right now calling Python a train wreck and referring to fucking R of all the languages in existence as a better alternative? I really like some of the capabilities of R and often use them via a wrapper in Python, but holy fucking hell, the language is complete and utter failure. I can't think of a single thing that I like about it. It's horrible and a shame how many nice packages exist for it.

Also
>Matplotlib makes disgusting graphs
The plots matplotlib generates are just as disgusting as you chose them to be. I'd agree that matplotlib is a clusterfuck in itself (inconsistencies, multiple parallel concepts etc), but for what it does it's perfectly fine.

>>8505084
>Only a fool would use python for a large project.
What's the reasoning? Python is perfectly fine for large projects. There are things you shouldn't do with Python of course, but beyond that there's no problem.

>>8505089
Octave is MATLAB minus all the great things about MATLAB. If you are at the point of using Octave, you might just as well use Python instead. Nobody seriously uses Octave in science, just fucking nobody.

>>8506487
stormy attaway is good and all over the net as pdf

>>8506491
lots of free tutorials online for scilab

>>8505081
Python is not proven.
MATLAB is used for airplane controls, satellite guidance and real-time securities trading.
Python is OK for trivial programming, but JP Morgan is not going to let you trade their money with your python program you think will work.

>>8506558
Yes, I am. R is absolutely better in this context. Better built-in functions for statistics and data exploration, better data types and syntactic sugar for data storage and visualization, better library of supporting packages. The only thing it doesn't do as well as Python is that its OO syntax is kind of junk but for 99% of what you use R for in science, you don't need the OO paradigm.

Python is a tool that was adapted for scientific work and does an ok job. R was designed from the ground-up for scientific work and does everything it needs to do.

>>8505436
that does not sound advanced at all
a proper course would cover applied subjects from upper division math:
pde
advanced linear
complex variable
relevant algebra
relevant analysis
nonlinear ode
differential geometry
optimization
etc

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Engineering-Mathematics-Erwin-Kreyszig/dp/0470458364
https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Mathematical-Methods-Scientists-Engineers/dp/1441931872

>>8506625
The packages are fine. I'm not talking about those, I'm talking about the language. It's disgusting and horrible and nobody should be forced to use it.

>>8506636
Name specific features of the language that you don't like, because I just don't believe you know what you're talking about. The syntax is only trivially different from many other interpreted languages out there. It's a high level language with calls to compiled functions for things that are computationally intensive, it has first class functions, it has built-in convenient iterators across vectors for use in loops, it lets you index matrices and tables with boolean vectors in an easy way.

The biggest issues with R as a language is that it can't be used as a server back-end, you can't build interactive tools with it, and it has issues with memory usage. However, again, remember that it is used for and meant for scientific computing, where you typically have access to high performance servers/clusters, and was never meant and is rarely asked to do those other things.

>>8506652
There you go
http://arrgh.tim-smith.us

>>8506676
Almost all of those complaints are either trivial things like "waaaaahhhh i dont like arrows and i want to pretend you can't use equal signs for assignment" or incredibly stupid things like "why can't i use pythonic idioms in languages that aren't python".

Come back when you have a complaint about the language that isn't just someone else's refusal to learn the basics.

>>8506691
>Almost all those things are things that make programming horrible for anyone who is used to any other language, for no good reason
That's right. I know those are all things you get used to eventually, but I don't really want to.

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Not really into technical computing myself but what about Julia? It's pretty fucking fast andalso free.

>>8506630
Well yeah cause my school is filled with cuck brainless who need a class to spend half the semester going over stuff we'be already learned. Apparently they're changing the curriculum to cover more of that stuff AFTER this semester so I kinda got cucked

>>8506700
Your unwillingness to learn is not a fault of the language.

>>8506708
promising but not quite ready for primetime

>>8506427
Your legal department does.

>>8506487
http://4chan-science.wikia.com/wiki/Programming_Textbook_Recommendations#Matlab

>>8507038
My legal department doesn't know half the shit I do is gray area.

>>8506630
"Advanced Engineering Mathematics" means different things in different schools. Sometimes it's the ODEs+matrix algebra crash course, others it's a PDEs+complex variables crash course, and others still it's a math method course beyond PDEs.

>all this shilling in this thread god kill me now

>>8506618
>Python is not proven
NASA uses matplotlib for making reports

>>8507253
making reports is not exactly a mission critical application

>>8506618
>MATLAB is used for airplane controls, satellite guidance and real-time securities trading.
prove it?
I use to work on satellites and we used MATLAB for modelling and testing algos, but most in my group assumed the algo would be put in a real compiled language when put on the final product

>>8502209
why does matlab's symbol look like a penis...

>>8507317
because it's for engineering

>>8507333
it looks pretty erect to me

>>8507317
that's because you're a homosexual.

Yeah, algorithms are developed in Matlab and then optimized for performance and implemented in other languages. Especially for real time systems.

I was originally a computer science major before switching to civil engineering. I was disappointed that my school required me to take a matlab course right after I switched from CS after having my fill of programming. But I ended up learning more about programming from one semester of matlab than I did from three semesters of Java and other CS classes. Made a really cool final project that I never dreamed I could make using my knowledge of object oriented languages.

Of course I haven't used it since that class, but it was fun.

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>>8507317

>>8507353
>from three semesters of Java

God damn CS majors are brainlets

So what's the problem with pirating Matlab?

>>8502209
MSME Robotics and automation here
Used mathatica, currently use a combination of Matlab, c/c++, and LabVIEW at work.
Take a generic programming course (c++ is probably the best) and then all languages become learning syntax. Matlab is VERY useful for linear algebra because that's what it was originally built for. With a couple addons, it becomes a pretty good solver, though I still prefer Mathematica for solving really complex stuff like PDEs.

Take the theory course for linear algebra

>>8504959
I sucked at LA when I did the class, nowadays after I've been using it for years it became easy.