I am not taking a MATLAB college course until spring 2021 but I want to get ahead and start learning now do I have to pay the $150 license?

Question

Or can I still get the $50 student fee? Thanks for any help or advice.

Answer 1

There is no reason you should buy matlab since, on its own, matlab is pretty useless. It's the packages that come with matlab that give it so much power and your university will almost certainly have a copy of matlab, complete with all the packages, on their local computers

Answer 2

Why not try GNU Octave?  That's mostly compatible with MATLAB, but free and open-source.



I'd suggest reading about the product at Wikipedia before potentially more biased sources at either MathWorks or from the Octave developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave



This page from a Wikibook on MATLAB programming has some suggestions about using Octave as a tool to learn MATLAB:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_between_Octave_and_MATLAB



Watch out for promotional sites.  I found a fairly high BS/content ratio on just the first page of hits from a search for "matlab vs octave".

Answer 3

You should only pay the $50 student fee, but most software companies will require you to have a .edu e-mail address or buy it from your school's software store.  Check with your school's software "store" (all schools have them) first since they may have free or even further discounted copies available.