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QUESTION: Where can you get MATLAB, add-ons, help with questions, etc?
Today we’re going to talk about, what is matlab, how do you get it, various add-ons and toolboxes you can purchase to extend the abilities of matlab, and generally how how you can get help using matlab. So the first thing I’m going to show you is just I’m going to Google matlab, and right at the top you see matlab’s official website. So that’s where you can go to get matlab and learn a little bit more about it just by reading on your own. To give you a short introduction though, matlab stands for matrix laboratory. So if you’ve ever programmed before it’s a little bit different because matlab is mostly for math and all the variables are matrices, even scalars are matrices. Matlab is usually used in academia and research so if you’re taking a university course which involves numerical computing you’ll probably use matlab. If you’re doing research and you’re analyzing data your professor probably already uses matlab and everyone in your lab as a result will be using matlab. Matlab is used in fields of engineering, science, finance, and economics. At its simplest matlab basically does calculations so it’s like a very fancy calculator. On top of that though, you can write code to evaluate a complicated formula, you can plot equations and data, and you can implement algorithms. Ok, so let’s talk about getting matlab. So I’ve already opened the website, if you scroll down to the bottom, or near the bottom, you can see a section called try or buy. So you can try matlab for free probably a trial that lasts 30 days…let’s check. It doesn’t say you have to enter your email but it’s a limited time trial so it won’t last forever. If you want to buy matlab there are several options. So the standard matlab you probably don’t want to use its over $2,000, and if you’re part of an educational institution you can use the education tab and get matlab for $500, the home version is just for personal use that’s a $149, and the student version is $49 so you probably have to go through some process to prove that you’re student. Another way that you can probably get matlab is if you are a student at a university there are options that the university has for you to get matlab, so you have to consult with your University’s resources such as the website or the bookstore to see if you can possibly even get it for free. For this tutorial I’m going to be using the 201 a version of matlab. So one thing you’ll notice is for the home version and the student version is they have these add-on products that you can get for a price. So add-ons are also called toolboxes and they have functionality and code that can be useful for you in your specific field of work. So, for example, if you do bio informatics you may want to purchase the bio informatics toolbox. So you can click on the links and get an idea of what’s included in the packages, maybe you do bio informatics and you don’t really even need the functions that the tool box comes with, so you might not want to purchase it. But, in general you can browse the documentation for free so you can see everything that you would get if you did purchase the toolbox. It’s essentially an API, so you can look at any function see what the input and the output is and decide if that’s useful for you. The next thing I want to talk about is how to get help with matlab. So you’re already taking this course and you’re going to learn a lot about matlab here, and when you start coding they’re probably going to be some very specific things you want to do that you don’t know how to do yet. So one place you can go I clicked on the community tab on the matlab website and so you can see there is a community of people who use matlab who post on this site. The file exchange I’ve used before people post useful functions and code that you know you may need in your projects that can be useful. There’s also a section called matlab answers where people ask questions and you can answer them or you can ask a question and someone else can answer you. Personally, I would recommend just searching your question on Google because they’ve already indexed all this stuff you could potentially put your question in the search box on the matlab site as well though, and you might on Google also get stackoverflow results so it wouldn’t only be matlab central which might be helpful.
