USE OF MAXIMA AND XMAXIMA IN PATRAS, GREECE

On 7 Sep 2002, synthespian wrote:

> 	With regards to Maxima, I find that one of the most important things
> lacking in Maxima is simple documentation on how to use formulas and
> such, from the user's perspective.

I agree.  I found all the "primer" style documentation too trivial, and a
systematic study of the reference documenation would be very time
consuming and not necessarily immediately helpful.

I am considering writing a short document that would describe getting the
most out of Maxima from a user's perspective, with a particular eye to
highlighting the differences in how one uses Maxima vs. Maple and
Mathematica.  The goal would be to help people who want to convert from
one of the closed systems to Maxima.

I am a sophisticated computer user but at the same time an unsophisticated
computer algebra user, and though I am also a strong open source advocate
it was an iffy proposition at the beginning of my recent math course as to
whether I could safely commit to using Maxima instead of Maple.  So far,
so good, with the gracious support of this mailing list.  But a document
like the one I hope to write would have made the decision easier.

The heart of the document would be taking a nontrivial multistep problem
and showing how it would be done in Maple and then again in Maxima,
showing the difference in "workspace" approaches between the two systesms
that was the main obstacle I encountered when trying to use Maxima for the
first time after a little bit of Maple experience.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Rich