I haven't completed 'what I think is the minimum set' yet and I hope I can complete within a couple of weeks. If youįamiliar with these minimal set of functionality, you would get some 'feeling' about the tool and then you would make sense out of the official document from Mathworks or GNU Octave which explains all the functions but not so many examples. My purpose is to provide you the set of basic commands with examples so that you can at least read the most of sample script you can get from here and there (e.g, internet) without overwhelming you. There are huge number of functions which has not been explained here, but I would try to list those functions which are most commonly used in most of matlab sample script you can get. I would try to list those commands that can work both with Matlab and Octave). The main advantage of Matlab is the huge number of ready to use tools.
OCTAVE VS MATLAB CODE
They are not fully compatible that is code written in Matlab can crush in octave and vice versa. Matlab consist of specialized toolboxes which are not part of Octave. The main difference is syntax and other features.
Matrix operations follow the rules of linear algebra. You can use these arithmetic operations to perform numeric computations, for example, adding two numbers, raising the elements of an array to a given power, or multiplying two matrices. I don't think it has 100% compatability between Octave and Matlab, but I noticed that most of basic commands are compatible. MATLAB vs Octave are mainly used for the same purpose. MATLAB has two different types of arithmetic operations: array operations and matrix operations. (Octave is a GNU program which is designed to provide a free tool that work like Matlab. In this page, I would post a quick reference for Matlab and Octave.