In my courses that have a computational component, one of your first tasks is to install MATLAB on your computer. Go to help.unc.edu (requires an ONYEN and password) and follow the ordering instructions (it doesn't cost you anything; but you need to order to have ITS burn you a dvd). If running Linux or Mac OS, you will need to get the license.dat file from that same page; if running Windows, you will need the PLP listed there.
Once you have MATLAB installed, we'll have to start to learn what it is capable of doing. Be forewarned that it is a very extensive and powerful program, used throughout numerous academic and industrial settings, so do not become discouraged that you don't immediately grasp everything that it can do. My research program has extensively used MATLAB for over a decade, and there are many many many things MATLAB can do of which I remain completely ignorant! So don't expect detailed understanding immediately out of the gate; rather, we will carefully detail and then practice a number of simple ways to utilize MATLAB as a tool for various purposes throughout our course. Once you see some sample MATLAB commands, it is often useful to look at the documentation for those commands. For instance, one of the first commands we will use is a simple for loop. To access the text help of the for command, type help for (and enter) in the MATLAB command window; to access the same information in a fullblown help browser window, type doc for. You can similarly use the help and doc commands to access the documentation of any specified MATLAB function.
While seeing examples and subsequently looking at documentation is one important way to learn and practice using MATLAB, one may also find it helpful and inspiring to see a wide breadth of tasks that MATLAB can handle, as for instance covered by the text Numerical Computing with MATLAB by Cleve Moler, the founding creator of the program. One can download individual chapters and MATLAB codes from the website of Moler's textbook. I believe it is worthwhile to look at many of the sections of the "Introduction to Matlab" chapter of that book, and you may be particularly entertained reading about and playing with the tools that mimic the Google PageRank algorithm near the end of the "Linear Equations" chapter.
ITS provides some introductory information about using MATLAB on a help.unc.edu page.
There is a lot of information available on the MATLAB Tutorial pages.
Additional links and information about introductory MATLAB use are posted on the BioCalculus Computation pages.
