Preface Motivation The purpose of this book is to teach fundamentals of programming concepts and skills needed for basic problem solving, all using MATLAB W as the vehicle. MATLAB is a powerful software package that has built-in functions to accomplish a diverse range of tasks, from mathematical operations to three-dimensional imaging. Additionally, MATLAB has a complete set of programming constructs that allows users to customize programs to their own specifications. The many books that introduce MATLAB come in two basic flavors: those that demonstrate the use of the built-in functions in MATLAB, with a chapter or two on some programming concepts; and those that cover only the programming constructs without mentioning many of the built-in functions that make