2025 - Programming in Matlab

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Free

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Course details

Introduction

This course is designed to teach participants how to program in Matlab. The course will be mostly self-paced so that people can progress at the speed that is right for them. There will be no common end point, as fast-learner or people that already have more programming experience will learn about more topics or to a deeper level. We end the course with a practical task to solve a real problem using programming.

What you’ll learn

After following this course students will be able to program in Matlab to an intermediate level. They will:

know the basics of imperative programming, the use of functions and loops
be able to read in own data, perform basic quantitative analyses on the data, visualize the results and store them for further analysis.
be acquainted with good programming practices and programming in a collaboration.

Course format

Work groups and short lectures. An introductory day is available for novices.

The course is Bring-Your-Own. All participants bring their own laptop to the course (please let us know if you do not have a laptop and we will make arrangements). Ideally, you should have Matlab preinstalled, but we can help with installation of Matlab at the beginning of the course if needed.

On the first day of the course, novices and people needing a refresher can do the Matlab Onramp course, with support from supervisors. On the second day, everyone meets and gives a short introduction and prepares for the second week.

In the second week we will proceed with workgroups and solve real-world problems using Matlab code, and try to work through some data that was brought in by participants.

Course content

The following topics will be covered during the course:

Using the Matlab GUI
Basic programming in Matlab (variables, loops, function calls)
Data visualization
Basic input/output
Debugging and code optimization
Use of version control and software repositories
Solving real-world problems with Matlab

Requirements

No prior knowledge is required

Downloads & extra recourses

There are good introductory books on Matlab available to support you in the course. Here are some suggestions from the organisers:

Matlab: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving by Attaway.

Very good introduction up to intermediate level of Matlab programming. Good programming style. Well explained. About 40 euros. Note that this is not the book with a similar name from Upskill Learning. That book is too basic for the course.

Essential MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists by Hahn and Valentine.

Extensive introduction to Matlab up to intermediate level. About 40 euros.

Mastering MATLAB by Hanselman and Littlefield.

Very extensive introduction to Matlab up to intermediate level. About 80 euros

Matlab for Brain and Cognitive Scientists by Cohen.

Extensive book aimed specifically at analysis of neuroscience data, but also providing a good introduction to programming in Matlab. 50 euros.

Matlab for Neuroscientists by Wallisch and others.

Not a very good introduction to Matlab programming but contains many interesting chapters on neuroscience data analysis. Matlab for Beginners: A Gentle Approach. Very basic. We hope to get further than this book in this course.