2007-12-14 Excellent product, well supported by both Mathworks and the community

Matlab has become very popular in the engineering field. Whilst both Maple and Mathematica have stronger symbolic capabilities, Matlab excels in the numerics and so tends to be used for engineering more than pure maths.

The Matlab documentation is built into the program and 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 and 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 and 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 and Mac are supported on the student version. Since I used Solaris as a student, I would have found this annoying. There would be no harm in asking if they would give a license for Solaris.