FINAL EXAM SPECIFICS
DATE: Friday, May 5, 2006
LOCATION: Livingston Gym (not the RAC—the gym is a white building with a blue
roof—it is near a TV tower)
TIME: 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm LATECOMERS WILL NOT BE ADMITTED SO MAKE
SURE YOU ARRIVE BY 3:45 pm AT THE LATEST!!
PROTOCOL: You can only bring the following items with you to the exam room:
 Your Rutgers ID (we need this to verify your identity when you hand in
your examination papers)
 Erasers (free standing—not at the end of a pen or pencil)
Items such as your own pens, pencils, paper, book bags, food/drink, and technology
devices (e.g. cell phones, pagers, cameras, IPODs, etc.) are not allowed in the
examination room. We will provide you with blue books and pencils (with erasers).
TIME LIMIT: 3 hours. The exam will start at 4:00 pm and end at 7:00 pm.
FORMAT: Similar to the midterm exam; However, on the final exam you will have total
of 8 programming problems (4 ANSI C and 4 Matlab) and 1 bonus UNIX question.
MATERIAL COVERED:
 Everything listed on the midterm review sheet that is available on the course
website. The link is called “Midterm Review Topics”.
 Matlab Chapters 1-5.
o Chapter 1: Operations and precedence; Assignment operator (“=”),
variables and constants; Matlab menus and the Matlab text editor; Matlab
windows; Using the editor versus using the interactive Matlab command
window; script files versus function files; brief introduction to
miscellaneous built-in functions (e.g. asin, exp) and conditional
statements/loops.
o Chapter 2: Vectors (unidimensional, row and column), arrays, and
matrixes (multidimensional) (remember to review the Matrix math
handout on the class website); vector/array/matrix arithmetic operations
(don’t forget your “period”!); length/magnitude/absolute value; built-in
functions (e.g. find and linspace); polynomials (addition, subtraction,
multiplication [conv], division [deconv], poly(r)
o Chapter 3: Built-in functions; diary command; .m versus .mat files; disp
command (similar to printf); formatting (e.g. format short, format bank);
input function (similar to scanf); lookfor command (for finding
information about built-in functions); expressing function arguments (e.g
sin(x2 + 5) is written sin(x.^2 + 5) in Matlab); Trig functions in Matlab
operate in RADIANS; user-defined functions (function z = fun(x,y)
function [output variables] = name (input variables); remember, variables
in a user-defined function are local to that function only; cell arrays (think
MS Excel); structure arrays (think database).
o Chapter 4: Relational operators (e.g. >, < ); Logical or Boolean operators
(not ~, and &, or |); Truth Table; Order of precedence (e.g. parentheses
first, OR last); find function (computes the array containing the indices of
the nonzero elements of the array); Conditional statements (if,
else….don’t forget “end”); Loops (for and while….the logic is the same as
you learned in C….use for when you know the number of passes in
advance, use while when you do not); S;trings (don’t forget your single
quotation marks); don’t forget your ranges (m:n:p) m=start, p=end,
n=spacing….the default in Matlab is 1); the switch/case function (the
alternative to if/else).
o Chapter 5: XY plot functions (rectilinear); log plots; semi-log plots;
plot/lable/title commands; subplot command; grid command; axis
command (use this to override Matlab’s choices); fplot command (when
you want a more fine-grained plot); overlay plots (e.g. plot(A); function
discovery (for linear, power, and exponential functions).
LAST SUGGESTIONS: Bring homework problems into recitation this work and ask
your TA to work them out for you. This will help you think about the types of problems
that will be on the final. See your TA for extra help!