Anyone using a CAS in this course or coding in a traditional language instead?
The tutorial letters don't mention anything about this, but I'd like to know how to approach this course, i.e. are we supposed to be using software/CAS/whatever to solve the problems?
The textbook uses MATLAB, so I'm busy trying out
Octave, an open source MATLAB clone. It works very well, mostly, but there is some missing functionality, which can be found in extra packages.
For example, I had to install the octave-optim package for the fminbnd command and I'm still trying to figure out which package has the solve command (or if it's even supported by octave).
Does anyone have any experience with octave? Any advice on which extra packages should be installed or would be useful?
I'm using Debian Lenny, btw.
I've found these similar topics from previous years:
http://osprey.unisa.ac.za/phorum/read.php?322,104288
http://osprey.unisa.ac.za/phorum/read.php?232,74510
http://osprey.unisa.ac.za/phorum_2003/read.php?f=28&i=1&t=1
