It is an excellent idea to type in the commands in NMM sections 2.1 and 2.2, to see what they do, and to get familiar with using the Matlab command line. (But don’t worry about the comparison with FORTRAN towards the end of 2.2). Experiment! Nothing you type will break the computer; if you get confused you can type
Pay attention to the use and special meaning of these symbols in Matlab, misuse can lead to confusing bugs:
For scientific notation, type
Beware that Matlab is case-sensitive, i.e. capital letters and lower-case letters are usually treated as complete different, and essentially all of the functions provided by Matlab are written in lower-case only. If you type
You can skip sections 2.3 and 2.4 the first time through. You definitely must learn how to make ordinary 2-d plots; sections 2.5.1 and 2.5.2 are a good introduction. Note that with the new version of Matlab, you can make all sorts of changes using the menu at top of the plot window, and double-clicking parts of the plot usually brings up an appropriate menu. The other sections of 2.5 can be skipped (until you need to make a fancy plot).
After you feel comfortable running single Matlab commands from the command line, you are ready to start saving a sequence of commands in a “script m-file” with a name that ends with .m; when you type the name of the script file on the command line (without the .m), Matlab executes all of the commands in the file. NMM Section 3.1 gives some good examples.