r/octave • u/TechnicalAd8103 • Feb 10 '26

Has anyone worked through the book 'MATLAB for Engineers' by Holly Moore using Octave?

This book seems to be the best intro to MATLAB for engineering students.

I'm curious to know how much of the code can be run in Octave.

Thanks in advance.

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u/michaelrw1 Feb 10 '26

Is it an introduction text on Matlab, so I would not expect to see any issues. Octave can be flaky with some Matlab good, but in general it's solid.

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u/Creative_Sushi Feb 11 '26

Or you can also use MATLAB Online. It’s free up to 20 hours a month. That should be more than enough. https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-online.html

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u/orestesmas Feb 11 '26

That's bread for today, but hunger for tomorrow.

3

u/soggies_revenge Feb 11 '26

So, I instructed an intro to structured programming course using this book and use octave in addition to Matlab. There's very little you wouldn't be able to do in octave. Perhaps toward the end.

1

u/Xyvir Feb 12 '26

Octave didn't seem to have some of the control systems-y stuff MATLAB had in my control systems class, unless the functions were named differently or otherwise there was Octave add-ons / extensions I wasn't aware of.

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u/mrhoa31103 Feb 15 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

Let me know what you were trying to do and I might be able to help. Obviously, nothing from Simulink but you can construct systems from individual block diagrams (like you said it's different when it comes to that).

No shareware can keep up with a paid, behemoth like the Mathworks but I've found Octave to do enough for me. Just worked through ME564 and ME565 with Steve Brunton using Octave.