GNU Octave by Example: A Fast and Practical Approach to Learning GNU Octave

by Ashwin Pajankar, Sharvani Chandu

Overview

Get a quick start to learn, understand, and apply GNU Octave using a math- and programming-friendly approach. This book focuses on an end-to-end track to teach mathematical programming, data science, signal processing, and image processing with GNU Octave.

GNU Octave by Example starts with an introduction to GNU Octave, a free and open-source alternative to MATLAB. Next, it explains the processes to install GNU Octave on popular operating systems such as Windows, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, and other platforms. Further, it covers hands-on exercises with GNU Octave exploring the basic functionality and command line in interactive mode. This is followed by covering matrices and various operations including how to read and analyze data from various sources. Moving forward, it introduces commonly used programming constructs in data visualization. It explains 2D and 3D data visualization along with data analysis. It also demonstrates the concepts related to geometry and its application with GNU Octave. It concludes with coverage of signal processing followed by image, video, and audio processing techniques.

After reading this book, you will be able to write your own programs for scientific and numerical applications.

What You Will Learn

● Understand the practical aspects of GNU Octave with math and programming-friendly abstractions

● Install GNU Octave on multiple platforms including Windows, Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu

● Work with GNU Octave using the GUI, the command line, and Jupyter notebooks

● Implement 2D and 3D data visualization and analysis with GNU Octave

Who This Book Is For

Software engineers, data engineers, data science enthusiasts, and computer vision professionals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781484260852
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Edition description:	1st ed.
Pages:	173
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ashwin Pajankar holds a Master of Technology from IIIT Hyderabad. He started programming and tinkering with electronics at the tender age of seven. BASIC was the first programming language he worked with. He was gradually exposed to C programming, 8085, and x86 assembly programming during his higher secondary schooling. He is proficient in x86 assembly, C, Java, Python, and shell programming. He is also proficient with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other single board computers and microcontrollers. Ashwin is passionate about training and mentoring. He has trained more than 60,000 students and professionals in live and online training courses. He has published more than a dozen books with many international and Indian publishers. He has also reviewed numerous books and educational video courses. This is his fourth book with Apress and he is working on more books. He regularly conducts programming bootcamps and hands-on training for software companies.

He is also an avid YouTuber with more than 10,000 subscribers to his channel. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Sharvani Chandu holds an MS in Computer Vision from CMU and BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIIT Hyderabad. She has research experience in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. She currently works for Amazon and has also worked in Bangalore as a software engineer for a couple of years focusing on machine learning and natural language processing. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked as a research intern, teaching assistant, and research assistant. She has also published research papers related to her work. She is enthusiastic about working in the areas of mathematics, computer vision, and programming.

You can find her on LinkedIn.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: An introduction to GNU Octave

Chapter Goal: Introduce the reader to the GNU Octave tool and steps for the installation on various popular platform

No of pages - 15 (will include the screenshots of GUI too)

Sub -Topics

1. What is GNU Octave and its history

2. Applications

3. Limitations of Octave

4. The Octave Community

5. Comparison with other tools (MATLAB and Scilab)

6. Install Octave and Jupyter

● Windows

● Ubuntu

● Raspberry Pi

7. Octave Programming Modes

● Octave CLI and launching CLI from the command prompt

● Octave GUI and *.m files

● Jupyter Notebook

Chapter 2: Action with Octave Programming

Chapter Goal: Help the reader to engage with hands-on exercises with GNU Octave. Readers will explore the basic functionality of the GUI and command line in the interactive mode.

No of pages: 10

Sub - Topics

1. Getting started with the interactive mode

2. Basics of variables

3. Data types and naming conversions

4. Global and local variables

5. Clear the screen and get the help

6. Writing scripts and launching them from the command prompt

7. Predefined constants and common mathematical functions

8. Complex variables

9. Various Operations on variables

Chapter 3: Matrices and Operations

Chapter Goal: Demonstrate the multidimensional data with matrices and their operations with GNU Octave

No of pages: 15

Sub - Topics:

1. Scalars, vectors, and matrices

2. Operations on Matrices and Arrays

Chapter 4: Scripts, Loops, and User defined functions

Chapter Goal: Write Scripts and Loops. Learn how to write own custom user defined functions in GNU Octave. This chapter heavily focuses on scripting part and programming constructs. We will also see how to read the data from various sources for further working.

No of pages: 15

Sub - Topics:

1. Scripts

2. Loops

3. Define functions

4. Inline functions

5. Save data into files

6. Read data from csv files

7. Work with online data sources

8. Binary file format

Chapter 5 : Data Visualization

Chapter goal – Learn to visualize data with octave. Readers working in the data science and visualization domains will be benefited from this.

No of pages: 15

Sub - Topics:

1. 2D Plotting

2. 3D Plotting

3. Surface Plotting

Chapter 6 : Data Analysis

Chapter goal – Learn to analyze data with octave. Again, the readers working in the domain of data science and analytics will benefit from this.

No of pages: 10

Sub - Topics:

1. Simple descriptive statistics

2. Histogram and moments

3. Comparing data sets

4. Function fitting

5. Polynomial fitting

Chapter 7 : Geometry

Chapter goal – Understand geometry and its applications with octave. We will explore the GNU Octave implementation of important geometry related algorithms.

No of pages: 10

Sub - Topics:

1. Delaunay Triangulation

2. Voronoi Diagrams

3. Convex Hull

4. Interpolation on Scattered Data

Chapter 8 : Signal Processing

Chapter goal – Learn to work with Fourier analysis and processing techniques for signal.

No of pages: 10

Sub - Topics:

1. Signal Generation

2. Fourier Analysis

Chapter 9 : Image, Video, and Audio Processing

Chapter goal – Learn to process images, video, and audio. We will see all the techniques in details.

No of pages: 20

Sub - Topics:

1. Image Processing

2. Video Processing

3. Audio Processing

Appendix

Chapter goal – This chapter will have all assorted topics that are not related to each other but very important for readers.

No of pages: 10

Sub - Topics:

1. Oct2py

2. Structures and cellarrays