At a different college, I loved that class. It brought equations to within a hair's breath of symbolic data for me in 1+ dimensional arrays. It was absolutely e

At a different college, I loved that class. It brought equations to within a hair's breath of symbolic data for me in 1+ dimensional arrays. It was absolutely essential for the honors chemistry/physics/compsci track. I had an HP 48G calculator at the time that could do symbolic derivation and all of the matrix decompositions. And if it didn't have a function, it was easy to write your own in any of four (4) programming languages: symbolic user programs (User-RPL), their compiled language (System-RPL), C or assembly. The matrix editor looked exactly like a spreadsheet. What's cool about HP's Erable (CAS) is, just short of being LISP/Scheme, everything was a value. Compiled binaries could be pushed on the stack (RPN). Oh and programs could be copied to other HP 48G/GX's with it's incredibly-powerful serial IR port. Some ingenious soul figured out how to turn the calculator into a learning IR remote control with a library of preset manufacturer codes. (I once turned on all the TVs in the lecture hall from the back of the class (15 m away) with my calculator during lecture... and people freaked out. :D) People modded them with 2-8x as much memory by chip stacking and wiring the enable pin and an inverter to the processor. None of this 64KiB rubbish, 512KiB FTW. And if you couldn't see parens in your 3 line equation, there's a graphical equation editor. Finally, if you got bored of that, there's always the easter eggs with the team's name in a solved crossword puzzle and grayscale pictures of them (not like Tetris on an Agilent oscilloscope, but okay). I preferred his competitor's book because it made sense to me, Anton's Elementary Linear Algebra, Applications Version His book is Introduction to Linear Algebra.