Our goal is to present a brief introduction to a wide range of topics from Matlab. This introduction is by no means complete. In fact we could spend the whole semester on Matlab or Maple alone and still not describe every important issue. Rather we have chosen to select individual topics in hopes that we hit on tools that will be of benefit to a wide audience. Remember that Matlab is a programming and numerical environment. It is not intended to do the same things as Maple. Each of these software has its own strengths and weaknesses. For programming , modelling and numerical simulation, Matlab is by far the most important. In fact for mathematics involving matrices with numerical entries Matlab is hard to beat. With this in mind we have chosen to spend a great deal of time making you familiar with matrix concepts and constructs.