GNU Octave

    Modern engineering makes wide use of computer assisted analysis and design. GNU Octave is a powerful high level programming language that is open source and it is very useful in various engineering fields. It development was started in 1992 by the research team of professor Octave Levenspiel, Chemistry Department of Oregon State University. Currently, it is maintained by a group of programmers and engineers who share their knowledge with the rest of the world under the GNU licence. Octave shares a syntax that is very similar with MATLAB. This similarity is so deep that one can run most of Octave codes with MATLAB and viceversa.
    As a professor and engineer, I consider it as a very good tool for teaching in my classes. I also recommend it as a data analysis tool in many research projects, for startup companies (free software when money is tight in the beginning) but also as cost effective for matured businesses. Octave is used in academia and industry (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center). If you cannot afford MATLAB, Octave becomes extremely useful, especially if you need to buy various MATLAB toolboxes specific to your research projects. For this cases, Octave provides a large suite of packages - analog to MATLAB toolboxes.
    The newest version of Octave can be found and downloaded on the gnu webpage for Octave. For PC machines use windows tab. The following short video shows how you can download it and how you can install additional packages (toolboxes) that are not part of the standard installation of Octave.