Various Links

This course serves as an introduction to practical usage of the technical computation environment and the programming language of Matlab. The reason for teaching a commercial product at a public university is that there are a lot of courses at Linköping University using Matlab during program exercises or laboratory sessions. However, we must point out that there are a lot of alternatives to Matlab if you want to do technical computations, some of these are also commercial but others are share-ware programs available to download from the Internet.

Below you'll find some Matlab resources on the WWW and a few of the most common alternatives to Matlab and their home sites on the WWW.

Matlab on the WWW

• Matlab - The Language of Technical Computing, a product of the Mathworks.
• MATHTOOLS.net, a technical computing portal for all scientific and engineering needs.

Commercial Alternatives and Complements

• Mathematica is an advanced numerical and symbolical system developed by Wolfram Research. Mathematica is a very homogenous product that features every step from documentation of mathematical and technical information to advanced programming.
• Maple is a powerful computer algebra system, it can manipulate symbolic expressions as well as perform numerical computations. Maple is actually integrated with Matlab through the symbolic math toolbox.
• Mathcad is a package for numeric and symbolic calculations. It is in general not as advanced as Maple V or Mathemathica.

Matlab Clones and non-commercial Alternatives

• Octave is a free Matlab clone with lots of features, it's GPL licensed.
• SciLab is a scientific software package for numerical computations in a user-friendly environment. It has Matlab-like syntax.
• MuPAD is a nice symbolic and numerical manipulation package. It's reasonably free, which makes it a good alternative over commercial Maple. MuPAD stands for Multi Processing Algebra Data tool, thus it is designed to work on parallel computers or computers linked together in networks.
• Another choice is Numeric Python which is an extension to the Python programming language.