Teaching Computational Geosciences with MATLAB, Part 2: Resources

In a series of blog posts, I will tell you a little about how I teach computational geosciences with MATLAB. At the beginning of the course, the work environment is set up in MATLAB and resources are presented with information about MATLAB.

After a brief historical introduction to MATLAB and my personal history of using MATLAB over the past 25 years, I present the most important resources for information about MATLAB. The Community or MATLAB Central section of the MathWorks webpage provides all the important things that are important to users of the software.

When I started using MATLAB in 1992 the MATLAB newsgroup as part of the Usenet was, in addition to the MathWorks Support, the most important place to discuss questions about MATLAB with other users. The newsgroup later became the Newsreader, now a very active discussion forum of people using MATLAB in many different applications.

The File Exchange of user contributed MATLAB scripts was the second resource I frequently used to search and download scripts. Many years ago MathTools.net was the second most important place, previously independent but later taken over by MathWorks, with MathWorks producted listed first under the various categories of MathTools.

The most recent among the resources I use most is the Blogs, in particular the ones of Steve Eddings on image processing, Loren Shure on the art of MATLAB programming and Cleve Molar’s corner on mathematics and computing. The MathWorks webpage has a lot more resources you may find useful, such as the Link Exchange and the MATLAB Answers. MATLAB Cody is of course great fun with serious background if you wish to train your MATLAB coding skills.

In addition to these MathWorks resources we created our own ones, not open to the public, such as a Dropbox-type file exchange system and the course management system MOODLE.