How did you learn MATLAB, or generically speaking, how did you learn your first programming language?

try using various media approaches, anything on youtube? is there a MATLAB ecosystem that you can tap into? Sometimes you just need repeated exposure to concepts and sometimes you ned a way to put it into practical experience. Like a test tile.

I started with Microsoft Basic on a old Mac when I was 13. I wrote a program to catalog my baseball cards. Played with that for about a year. Then I touched a boob and stopped caring about computers until I was 22.

Then I got into web stuff. So HTML and CSS at first. A few years later PHP and MySQL. And after that Ruby and some Python.

I had to find a project I was interested in and just had to figure out how to build it. It is something you never completely learn. You can always do something in a better way. But it feels fucking fantastic when you fight with code for 4 hours and it finally works. possibly better then bad sex.

Sorry.. Can’t help with MATLAB, good luck.

@johnpowell: Perhaps this is my problem. If I stop touching boobs, will I become a better programmer?

I learned Matlab very, very quickly when I was hired to write a neural network for a graduate student at my past university. But it wasn’t my first language.

As a first language, Matlab is far easier that most.. you just need to learn the syntax as, the other concepts are no different than programming a calculator. The most important thing is just figuring out the fastest ways to get the commands you need, for example, if there is a command to list all of the functions in a module. Or find a good online reference.

If you know what an eigenvalue and topology is, then you can probably figure out matlab :)

oh, and if it counts, I’m rarely in the vicinity of breasts, and I’m an excellent programmer.

My first language was Pascal, but in general I think it’s easier to get started with a language offering an interpreter. The best way to learn in my opinion is creating little snippets of code to get a good first impression. Then move on to the theory (syntax, data structures, types etc.). Then create larger snippets of code and so forth. I’ve never tried Matlab, though.

My first exposure to programming was TI BASIC. Programming calculators was so much fun.

Find an interesting problem that you need to solve using MATLAB. If you don’t have a motivation more than “I want to learn this, because it will be Useful,” you won’t get very far.

@cwilbur: Thanks. I have a particular experiment I need to run so I have the problem in mind but I am so clueless right now I could not even imagine beginning to write the code from scratch. So I was hoping for a series of tutorials or something that would give me at least some cursory understanding of it before jumping in.

I started directly with c++. I see no reason not to. But java works, it’s easy.