Vectors are easily generated with MATLAB's colon
``:'' notation.
For example, the expression 1:5 creates the following row vector.
1 2 3 4 5
You can also create a vector using an increment other than one.
For example, 1:2:7 results in the vector
1 3 5 7
The increment may be negative and need not be an integer.
It is very easy to create a table using the colon notation.
Experiment with the commands
>> x=(0:pi/4:pi)'; y=cos(x); AA=[x y]
for a demonstration of this technique.
MATLAB permits users to easily manipulate the rows, columns, submatrices
and individual elements of a matrix. The subscripts of matrices can be vectors
themselves.
If x and v are vectors then x(v) is equivalent
to the vector [x(v(1)), x(v(2)), 
] . Subscripting a matrix with
vectors extracts a submatrix from it. For example,
suppose A is an 
matrix. A(1:4, 5:8) is the 
submatrix extracted from the first 4 rows and last 3 columns of the matrix.
When the colon operator is used by itself, it denotes all of the rows or
columns of a matrix. Using the result of the table above
>> AA(:,1)
produces the first column of matrix AA.
ans =
0
7.8540e-01
1.5708e+00
2.3562e+00
3.1416e+00