Customer Reviews

Excellent product, well supported by both Mathworks and the community - By: D. R. Kirkby, 14 Dec 2007
Matlab has become very popularin the engineering field. Whilst both Maple & Mathematica have stronger symbolic capabilities, Matlab excelsin the numerics & so tends to be used for engineering more than pure maths.

The Matlab documentation is built into the program & is also available online. There is a very active newsgroup comp.soft-sys.matlab where Matlab users can ask for help. It is read by a lot of staff from Mathworks & they, or other Matlab users, answer questions quickly. The importance of good support on this sort of software can not be overstated. This is a serious issue with Mathematica, which is a similar(ish) product to Matlab. The Mathematica newsgroup is moderated, so help requests can take a day before anyone sees them. To get a satisfactory answer to a question can often take a long time.

Matlab is excellent value for money for students, being cheaper than the student versions of either Maple or Mathematica. Although this is is a "sprat to catch a mackerel", as the commercial version of Matlab is expensive. This student version includes various toolboxes & Simulink, all of which are optional extras if you buy the commercial version.

The commercial version of Matlab is available on Solaris, but only Windows, Linux & Mac are supported on the student version. Since I used Solaris as a student, I would have found this annoying. There would be no harmin asking if they would give a license for Solaris.