Essential Maple

Book excerpt: What's in this book This book contains an accelerated introduction to Maple, a computer alge bra language. It is intended for scientific programmers who have experience with other computer languages such as C, FORTRAN, or Pascal. If you wish a longer and more leisurely introduction to Maple, see (8, 27, 39). This book is also intended as a reference summary for people who use Maple infrequently enough so that they forget key commands. Chapter 4 is a keyword summary. This will be useful if you have forgotten the exact Maple command for what you want. This chapter is best accessed through the table of contents, since it is organized by subject matter. The mathematical prerequisites are calculus, linear algebra, and some differential equations. A course in numerical analysis will also help. Any extra mathematics needed will be developed in the book. This book was prepared using Maple V Release 3, although most of the examples will work with, at most, only slight modification in Maple V Release 2. This book does not require any particular hardware. The systems I have used in developing the book are machines running IBM DOS and WIN/OS2, Unix machines in an ASCII terminal mode, and x windows systems. There should be no adjustments necessary for readers equipped with Macintoshes or other hardware. Maple is an evolving system. New features will be described in the documentation for updates (?updates in Maple).