Drawing on his teaching of the MATLAB computing environment to college freshmen, Palm (U. of Rhode Island) introduces the basics of this user-friendly language for numerical analysis, visualization, and symbolic manipulation that is a becoming a standard in a growing number of engineering fields. Includes examples of applications and exercises which assume no prior programming experience, and a master guide to covered commands and functions. Lacks references. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)