Book excerpt: This easy-to-follow guide provides academics and industrial engineers with a state-of-the-art numerical approach to the most frequent technical and economical optimization methods. In an engaging manner, it provides the reader with not only a systematic and comprehensive study, but also with necessary and directly implementable code written in the versatile and readily available platform Matlab. The book offers optimization methods for univariate and multivariate constrained or unconstrained functions, general optimization methods and multicriteria optimization methods; provides intuitively, step-by-step explained sample Matlab code, that can be easily adjusted to meet individual requirements; and uses a clear, concise presentation style, which will be suited to readers even without a programming background, as well as to students preparing for examinations in optimization methods.