MATLAB Demystified

If you have no prior knowledge of Matlab then this is probably as good as place to start as any. It is a shortish book which you can work through relatively quickly to give you all the basic skills. For more intermediate or advanced uses of Matlab then this book is not going to be any use, but then you wouldn't expect that given its title. The book uses a series of examples to show you basic features of Matlab, which help you learn quickly the commands and more particularly begin to understand the syntax that are so critical to Matlab and other mathematical software.

I got this as a gift for a future engineer (he's in college), and he loved it!!!

This book is great for the beginner. It assumes you know nothing, but because of that, once you learn the basics, it quickly becomes ineffective at teaching the advanced usages. It is great at starting one off down the right path and the mathworks website becomes useful for looking up more advanced or specialized commands.

If we could classify books intended to teach software in two categories- those focused on the tricks of the latest version and those ones centered in the contextualized applications - MATLAB Demystified would belong to the first class of books. A nice "direct to the point" approach on how to model, code and simulate real life situations. Accessible for all people interested in programming computers easily.