Mon. Nov 23 2009   Quick links: Math 224 main page Hurley's home page Math Department main page CWRU Home Page

Other sources of help

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• Information about Mathematica commands and their syntax can be accessed using Mathematica's built-in help.

• Wolfram Research, Inc. (developers of Mathematica) support a site called mathsource containing lots of material connected with Mathematica (utilities, sample code, documentation, etc.) It is a nice facility, but probably not of major importance to someone just starting out with Mathematica.

• The Mathematica book.

• There are several usenet newsgroups where there are regular postings about Mathematica.

• Other books

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Mathematica's Built-in Help

Mathematica has a fairly extensive built-in help system

• If you know the exact name of a command, (for example, Integrate) you enter a command made up of a question mark followed by the command name (no space) (e.g., ?Integrate) and press "Enter"; Mathematica responds with a short description of the command, including the syntax for its use. Using a double question mark ( ??Integrate) gives you some extra information in addition to that returned by the single question mark version.

• If you are uncertain of the spelling of the command, you may use the wild card "*"; for example, typing ?Int* returns a list of all Mathematica commands that begin with "Int" (which includes Integer, Integrate, Intersection and others). You may also use "*" as a typing shortcut; ?Integr* works the same as ?Integrate since Integrate is the only Mathematica command beginning with "Integr".
• there are also Help items built into Mathematica's menu structure; these vary with the type of computer being used.

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MathSource by W.R.I.

The makers of Mathematica maintain a WWW site called mathsource containing lots of information about Mathematica.

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The Mathematica book

The main reference book for using Mathematica is entitled "Mathematica: A system for doing Mathematics by Computer", by Stephen Wolfram, published by Addison-Wesley. It is a reference guide, not a tutorial in how to learn to use Mathematica. Especially useful is the Appendix which lists all of the built-in commands.

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Usenet newsgroups

There are several usenet newsgroups that are devoted to Mathematica either wholly or in part. They are <\P>

• comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica is a moderated group dealing solely with Mathematica.

• sci.math.symbolic is an unmoderated group dealing with all sorts of computer algebra systems (Mathematica, Maple, MatLab, Macsyma, Theorist, and others).

If you post a question to one of these groups, it is a good idea to identify the version of Mathematica being used, and the type of computer (unless it is absolutely clear that the type of computer is irrelevant; questions of the sort "I can't get some file to open correctly" are often the result of trying to open a file created on one type of computer on a different type of computer.)

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Other books about Mathematica

Search the library on-line catalog (catalog.cwru.edu) by subject (or by words in title) for Mathematica.

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