Welcome to the companion website of the electronic textbook, Computer Programming with MATLAB. The Apple iBooks version was designed for iPads, iPhones and Mac-s (OS X Mavericks and above). The book is available for $10 (plus tax where applicable) from the iTunes Bookstore in 51 countries. For readers who prefer Windows, Android or other platforms, or in countries where Apple does not sell textbooks, a PDF version is available for purchase on the Buy the Book page.

The authors have created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that covers some of the same material as the first half of this book. The videos are freely available from YouTube. Click on the Video Lectures link above for an outline of the MOOC with links to the various video lectures. In 2020, two new courses were created and made into a Coursera MATLAB Specialization.

The primary purpose of the book is to teach computer programming to novices with little to no previous experience. It uses the programming system and language called MATLAB to do so because MATLAB is easy to learn and, at the same time, is an extremely versatile and useful programming language and programming environment. MATLAB is being used in a wide variety of domains from the natural sciences through all disciplines of engineering to finance and beyond, and it is heavily used in industry. Hence, a solid background in MATLAB is an indispensable skill in today’s job market. Nevertheless, this book is not a reference manual to MATLAB and not even a MATLAB tutorial. It is an introductory programming textbook that happens to use MATLAB to illustrate general concepts in computer science and programming.

This book is a good fit for an introductory computer programming college course for engineering and science students. In fact, it is being used as the textbook for such a course at Vanderbilt University. It serves the dual purpose of teaching computer programming and providing background MATLAB, which is used in many higher-level courses in many majors. This book is also suitable to teach programming to high school students. The material assumes no background in mathematics that is not part of standard high school curricula, and MATLAB is much more accessible as an introduction to programming to the average student than Java or other general-purpose languages