Chapter 6. Making Your Own Package: A Poisson Equation Solver

In Chapter 1. we learned where to find and how to install Octave packages. Packages are basically a collection of functions (and possibly scripts) that are related to some particular scientific field or programming area. For example, the finance package has functionality that can help you to solve different financial problems and multi-core is a package that provides support for multi-core CPUs.

In this chapter, you will learn how to make your own Octave package. The package will be able to solve the one and two-dimensional Poisson equation. The reason to choose this classical example is that the mathematics is relatively simple, the programming part is not too complicated, and more importantly, the package can be used to solve a range of interesting problems encountered in engineering, fluid dynamics, electrostatics, biological population dynamics, and much more.

This chapter is divided into three parts. In part one, the application...