I want to learn Matlab programming so that I can conduct some researh/analysis on my own and also, so that I can study/modify some Matlab scripts that I have found online etc.

However, the problem is that I can't afford Matlab. Gnu Octave, from what I have heard, is quite Matlab compatable. The challenge with Octave though is that the documentation is very sparse.

So Matlab on one hand, is prohibitivly expensive (-ve), but has lots of good documentation, tutorials and scripts online (+)

Whilst,

Octave is free (as in beer), whilst (understandably), lacking comprehensive documentation etc.

I am thinking of downloading and installing Octave, but using Matlab documentation (and scripts) to help me get going. I am aware that there are some differences between Octave and Matlab - what I'm trying to work out is whether the differences are large enough to thwart my efforts to (effectively) "learn Matlab by using Octave".

Any constructive feedback welcome.

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Hmm, its interesting that there is no tag for octave on here. I suspect there may be some bias in the feedback I get ....