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 prohibitively expensive (-ve), but has lots of good documentation, tutorials and scripts online (+), while Octave is free (as in beer), even though (understandably) it lacks 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 ....