Getting started
To use these packages, you need to learn maths. Some of it you can pick up while using them.
The software packages in this Roundup are academic in some form. For that reason, they have both comprehensive documentation and good tutorials.
To get through them, you must also learn maths, though sometimes that is part of the reason to use them in the first place. Universities have developed several of the programs and are even maintaining them, adding new modules as they expand their curriculum. As you can probably guess, the tutorials are often very theoretical.
On the academic scale, Geogebra is much more of a teaching tool than the others. It is made as a web service for teachers and learning institutions. However, the source is available under the GPL so you can install it locally. One of its most impressive points is that the manual runs in the software – you don’t need to switch to a separate manual to learn about it. This is similar with Scilab and Octave. The two last ones have more power so you need to work more to get the full use of them.
At first glance, Scilab and GNU Octave are both barebones, but don’t be deceived – their power lies in their modules. They both follow the UNIX philosophy where you design software to do one thing well and then create other software for other functions – or modules, in this case. The modules range through many disciplines, from physics to chemistry and of course mathematical proofs. Both of these packages have their own programming languages.
Genius is a programming environment for mathematics and is very easy to start using. The manual is a little tricky but all the examples available from the Examples drop-down menu are very clear. Don’t expect to be an expert any time soon, though, as it also has its own language (GEL). The language is designed to look similar to the way you write mathematics in academic situations.
Scilab and Octave use the same method, so it’s worthwhile getting used to it.
The outlier in this collection is Engauge Digitizer. This program has much fewer functions, but you may find it very useful anyway. It takes a picture of a graph and helps you get the values into a spreadsheet from it.