codecademy! codecademy! codecademy! codecademy! http://www.codecademy.com/ Start with web fundamentals
Please don't do this, web fundamentals will barely help for matlab.
My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#22She should start by learning the mathematics and statistics that she will need to do the theory and the analytics necessary for her research. Then she can learn how the mathematical and statistical ideas can be applied using tools such as Matlab. Programming is seductive, because of the instant feedback it provides, but it does not provide much insight; math and statistics provides insight but connections may be obscured by a sea of data. What's needed is the combination of the two.
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#23I never used Matlab, but I am very familiar with R which I think is quite similar. So I'd advise your girlfriend to just play with the Matlab repl (enter 1+1 and see that it returns 2, plot a function, assign a variable, etc.), and then write some function on a text editor and load them into Matlab.
You can also help her to load some data (from a text file, a csv file, or maybe a database connection, depending on what's used at her lab), and then do some basic operations on them (calculate some basic statistics and do some easy plots).
When she can do all of that (and I don't think it should take her much time to learn), she'll be able to work with Matlab autonomously.
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#24Get a book. That's how people learn. No exceptions.
People can learn in other ways too.
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#25The R tutorial on codeschool.com is also really well-done, similar domain to matlab but not quite the same.
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#26Doing statistical analysis in MATLAB won't require your girlfriend to learn how to program. She'll most likely use a MATLAB toolbox that provides a graphical interface. The most she'll probably need to know is how to create data structures the toolboxes can use.
Re: My girlfriend who's an MD wants to learn how to program. How should she start?
#27Cleve Moler, one of the founders of MathWorks, has written two free books. The first, Experiments with MATLAB, might be a good starting point: http://www.mathworks.com/moler/exm/index.html. It teaches some maths as well as Matlab.
The official Getting Started Guide is good, and focuses on Matlab itself: http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/getting-started-with-ma...
MathWorks also has a relatively new set of online problems that she can work through: http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/cody/problems. In particular, the Cody Challenge problems start out very easy, but cover a range of language features. After doing some problems, she can see other people's solutions, and hence pick up on more idiomatic ways to do things in Matlab.