Physical Modeling in MATLAB
This book covers the fundamentals of MATLAB essential for beginners to conduct numerical analysis. It is user friendly and easy to use. It would be great if this book has sections to explain file input/output, file formatting, handling graphs and a little more depth in physical modeling from the physical viewpoint. The modeling part discusses mainly how to solve differential equations focusing on the integration of the function. It could use other typical problems such as wave equations, state-space representation and analysis, etc (it is unfortunate that Chapter 12 has a short description about “State Vectors” but it does not elaborate on their usage or examples).
I do not found any error in this book. Chapters are mostly written concisely and accurately. I found one minor error: “For example, if we know that f(0) = 5 billion cells, then we can write f(0) = 5 =b e^a0 (Near the end of section 8.1.)
This book can be used as a quick guide to check the syntax and usage of MATLAB commands/statement when writing a script, or as a reference to understand various concepts of mathematical operations handled by MATLAB. I have been using MATLAB over 15 years but found some new features of MATLAB in this book.
This book explains basics of MATLAB clearly. I recommend my students to refer to this book before reading any MATLAB reference manuals. Each concept of MALAB is concisely described in a logical way.
Most chapters are written in the same format. This makes easy to find the part in a chapter that is relevant to a given problem to solve. The glossary section at the end of chapter is concise and helpful. The chapters for Physical Modeling could be in a bit more detail.
Most chapters are written in the right length and depth. Chapter 8 could go a bit deeper in the physical content. The chapter is very good from the practical point of view.
The entire book could be divided into two parts; part 1 for MATLAB usage and part 2 for Physical Modeling. Part 2 could be elaborated.
“7.2 Physical modeling” does not fit to the flow. Physical modeling could be a stand-alone section and be beefed up.
Sections “12.1 What is a vector?”, “12.2 Dot and cross products”, and “12.4 Animation” provide general topics and comments on vectors. These sections could be included in Chapter 4 “Vectors”.
Section “12.6 What is a model for?” could be at the beginning of modeling (Chapter 8).
I do not find any interface related issue.
I do not find any grammatical error.
I do not find culturally any insensitive or offensive element in this book.
Overall, this book is very helpful to our students. I am planning to use this book in our “Computational Methods in Physics” course in the next fall semester. I also encourage my research students to read this book as a reference guide.