Introduction & Setup

Octave Tutorial #1
Topics
• -Basic Operation
• -Loading, saving and using Data
• -Plotting Data
• -Control Operations
• -Functions & Code Files
What is Octave?
• Octave is a high-level interpreted language
• Built with the intentions for numerical
computations
• Has capabilities for data visualization
• Primarily used as a prototyping tool to find
solutions before implementing them into
another programming language.
Why use Octave?
• Octave makes it incredibly fast to implement
idea’s from many fields of math and data
analysis.
• Octave is free compared to it’s most popular
opposition MatLab.
• Ability to plot graphs on your data straight out
of the box.
Installing Octave
• I generally like to use octave on my windows
machine.
• But Octave has Mac OS X and Linux
distributions.
• http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
Or
Google: Octave
Installing Octave (Windows)
• You need the Octave for Windows MinGW32
• On the download page it will take you to a wiki.
• On the Wiki you want to go to the Octave 3.2.X
for Windows MinGW32
• (Optional) There is a version which required
Visual Studio, and you can install via that
method if you like.
Installing Octave (Non Windows)
• There is a simple to follow Guide on the
download page for installing on OS X
• sudo apt-get install octave
• For some Linux Distributions you may have to
compile from source
• The latest release source is available from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave
Test Run
• Let’s test that Octave is working and ready to go.
• We will also look at how to customize our prompt to
be less cluttered.
Next
• Basic Operation

• Feel free to leave any questions in the

comments.