Octave & FreeMat Tutorial -- 00 -- Introduction
Channel: Andrew Norman
Date: 08/05/2013

This video introduces the series on an Octave and FreeMat tutorial.

Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL04PA2q0LfJI4kLcW0EKQcetWZd4q5bBP

Octave and FreeMat are open-source alternatives to Matlab used for numerical computations.

Note on using Octave in Windows:

I tried using Octave in Windows through Cygwin, and it really did not work very well.  However, I think it might have been better if I had installed the versions of Octave that were compiled with MS Visual Studio.

See the wiki here:
http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_Windows#Octave_with_Visual_Studio

Also, here's the Sourceforge download page.  I think the main package is "octave-3.6.2-vs2010-setup.exe", and everything else is extra packages for some more advanced stuff.  (But there's also a symbolic package which might by handy.)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/octave/files/Octave%20Windows%20binaries/Octave%203.6.2%20for%20Windows%20Microsoft%20Visual%20Studio/

That being said, FreeMat is still probably easier, but there are definitely advantages to using Octave.