# Basic Commands and Variables

By Jan Wiersig, modified by Udo Ernst and translated into English by Daniel Harnack.

Matlab is an interactive system used for numerical calculations and visualization in almost every field of technical and scientific research. Matlab excels in its ease of use, good graphics and high efficiency.

This introduction explains the basics mandatory to perform simple numerical calculations. First, we use Matlab as a command line interpreter. Entering of single commands will follow a prompt, here `>>`. An important command is `help`. This command returns descriptions and syntax for functions and commands. For example


`help sin`

shows information regarding the sine function. Also a link to the detailed documentations can be found, that can directly be called alternatively with the command `doc`. Short descriptions of commands, that match certain search pattern, can be obtained by `lookfor`.

Further useful commands include `quit` and `exit`, with which the Matlab session is terminated.