Mathematica is very easy to learn and will be extremely useful to you in this class, in other classes, and in your future engineering or scientific career. We will be preparing several mathematica scripts and they will appear in the homework as optional exercises.
Mathematica has a great many tutorials and help pages at its web site. If you've never used it, the very first thing to do is to view This beginner 2-part tutorial . After that you can go to the learning center and the knowledge base. For fun you should check out mathematica alpha.
Maple is another symbolic program, and it is available from Maplesoft. Perhaps easier to learn than matlab, better at algebraic manipulations. They also have lots of demos and tutorials at their website. IT IS ALSO available FREE to OSU students!
There are free symbolic programs, such as macsyma and python. Python is actually a meta-language with all sorts of capabilities, extremely useful (scripting, symbolics, numerics, etc); much more to learn but you can adopt python for a great many things.
Matlab (and the free octave) is a linear algebra based program that is more numerically-oriented. See Matlab.
All of the above programs have strengths and weaknesses, but no one will
fall short of delivering a great deal of productivity, for the price.