Well, a calculator is much more handy if you have to do only quick and simple calculations.

You can bring it always with you and, unless you use a subnotebook, is much lighter than a notebook, moreover is always ready to use, instead if you want to use a pc you have to turn it on and wait a little.

If I was in your situation, I would buy a cheaper calculator (no more than 60 euros) and a Maple student license.

Yes, SAGE is free, it is a good and reliable software, it introduces you to Python programming language and probably it has all you need for your current studies, so I recommend  you to try it (and also maxima (it is included in SAGE, but it is a standalone program), octave, scilab and gnuplot), but Maple has better capabilities (beginning from plotting and far more), there are some packages dedicated to students  and there are a lot of guides and worksheets that you can download and that can help you to better understand some mathematical concepts: most of them are free, but there are also some quite good guides that you can buy on Maple web store.

Maple has a nicer interface and you can easily do a lot of calculations just clicking on menus: I don't like "Clickable Calculus (TM)" very much and I suggest you to learn to use command line, however this feature allows you to use from the very beginning most of the power of Maple (at least up to entry undergraduate level) and sometimes it can be very confortable.

Moreover, Maple has also good typesetting capabilities: I suggest you to learn Latex, but sometimes you can save time using Maple for some tasks.

About the documentation, in addition to what Alec has already written, I suggest you to give a look at the useful tutorials and worksheets that you can find in the application and student center on Maplesoft site.

Have a nice day.

Gabriele I.

Did you look at the examples in the help pages?

Type:

?diff;

and you'll find the answer to your first question.

Please, note that you should write sin(x), not sinx, or Maple will consider "sinx" as the name of a variable.

I also suggest you to use functions, not expressions, i.e. ;

f:=x->cos((1+sin(x))^0.5);

so you can compute f'(x) using diff(f(x),x);

 

Are you sure that maximum and minimum commands exist within Maple ?

 

 

 

 

At: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trigonometric_identities you'll find a useful list of identities to solve your exercises. Just two small hints: 1) (sin(x))^2+(cos(x))^2=1 2) give a look at the half-angle formulas and rearrange the identity above to obtain cos(x) knowing sin(x) IMHO, you should ALWAYS solve by hand simple exercices like these ones and only later use Maple to check your answers and eventually make some experiments and graphs. Have a nice day. Cheers. albatros

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf you can find it also at: http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/ This is just a suggestion based on my personal and limitated experience, in the links already posted by the others you will find nearly all you need to use LaTeX with satisfaction. Bye! albatros

Type ?greek; or open the help window and search for greek: you'll get a list and some examples about how to enter greek letters.

You'll get the work done if, just before integrating, you expand your expression.

This is the answer:

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I use Maple 11.01, Linux 32 bit.

You could use: a:=%; to assign your last result (%) to the "variable" a. %% goes back two times, %%% goes back three times. However with the standard interface you can recall all the previous results just pressing ctrl+L and inserting the label number.

Maple help contains the answers to your questions. You can also give a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_integral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_function Maple uses symbols whenever it is possible (unless you specify that you want floating point approximations). P.S. I wrote in late: Mariner had already answered to you...

Here I put some screenshots: one two three