It is extremely helpful to have the aid of a general purpose symbolic-manipulation and computational mathematics program. One of the best and most widely available is MAPLE, and that is primarily the source of our computational aids in this course. As you go into technical fields, or even nontechnical fields that are growing increasingly reliant on technology, you may find it very useful to be able to carry out simple computations with the aid of a computer math system.
There is a lot of online documentation for MAPLE. Some useful resources are listed below.
MAPLE's help system makes it very easy to plunge right into MAPLE computations. Double-click on the ``Help'' button on the menu bar to bring up the help browser. By working your way through the help topics, you may find the commands you need to study. At the end of each Help topic is a set of examples of the use of the command. You may cut-and-paste these commands into your MAPLE session. Then by tailoring the command to your needs, you may complete the calculation you desire. This method-of-operation avoids many syntax errors.