Don't worry -- you aren't the first person to struggle with MATLAB! There's a lot of colleges these days which teach MATLAB in their introductory programming classes, especially engineering schools. If you aren't lucky enough to have a class, you might find that your upper level professors still expect you to be proficient. Hopefully the MATLAB tutorials below will help you get started:
Beginner Tutorials
- MathWorks Interactive MATLAB Tutorial -- Direct from the producers of MATLAB. Requires registration, but a good amount of knowledge is available in the form of videos and example code.
- Georgia Tech MATLAB Tutorial - This tutorial is based around a signal processing class at Tech, so most of the code will be oriented around DSP problems.
- MIT MATLAB Page - Less detailed than some, but this is one long page of MATLAB reference and example code.
- Stanford MATLAB Lesson - Like the MIT page, this is a single HTML page that attempts to cover the basics of MATLAB.