Use of MATLAB for the course (2:41)

a few words are in order concerningthe
software used in this course. As you can

see from the Syllabus, if yo've looked,
MatLab is the primary tool used for

programming in the course. There are some
options to this that are open source

options, Octave being the primary choice
among those. but it's highly recommended

that you think about or consider
purchasing a copy of MatLab. You are

eligible for the student addition, which
is $99 and can be downloaded off the web.

there are directions on the homepage of
how to do this. Why the investment? What

you get from that investment of $99 is a
very sophisticated package which allows

you to do an enormous amount of computing
and code development using this high level

language infrastructure. This is one of
the premises of this course which is want

to solve fairly complex problems and we
don't want to build all our code from

scratch, but rather, we would like to take
advantage of sort of in some sense, the

industry or the communities code building
efforts to give us what are ultimately

ancillary pieces of code that we would
like to use for some larger piece of code

development. So, MatLab has all this
integration with it. Octave in many ways

mimics a lot of the functionality of
Matlab, however, it's not quite as

powerful and then some of the routines are
not actually available in Octave. The

development itself is quite a bit slower.
And although, many of the major routines

are included in Octave, much of the
functionality we'll, we will be using in

MatLab are things that aren't necessarily
included in Octave. I will try to, as much

as possible, set up programs and routines
so that you will be able to use Octave.

But I would, like I said, encourage you to
think about MatLab and purchasing a

license there because it is a, it is a
very powerful tool that you can use well

beyond the end of this class. So, I will
say that about the packages. directions on

how to download Octave will be on the web
page or at least a link to the Octave web

site. also a link to Matlab and how to p
urchase a student edition will be

available. It is expected that one of
these two are, are at your disposal for

being able to do the homeworks for this
class.