Scilab: An Introductory Course

• What is Scilab?
• Why should you learn Scilab?
  • Advantages
  • Disadvantages
• What's next?

What is Scilab?

Scilab is a free and open source software for engineers & scientists, with a long history (first release in 1994) and a growing community.

Also, Scilab is a high level programming language for scientific programming. It enables a rapid prototyping of algorithms, without having to deal with the complexity of other more low level programming language such as C and Fortran.

Why should you learn Scilab?

Scilab is a powerful software and a pretty good alternative to the commercial Matlab, besides it's free and open source what allows us use it as we want.

Advantages

I'll list yo some advantages about the us of Scilab as numerical computing software:

• Open Source & Free: This's very useful because is easy to get and there is no problem when you use it.
• Easy to use: Scilab doens't havea very complex programming language is very similar to Matlab syntaxis.
• OS compatible: It's available for any OS.
• Lightweight software: In comparition to Matlab instalation, Scilab is much lighter than Matlab.

Disadvantages

Likewise, Scilab has certain point i don't really like about it. So, I'm going to be very honest with you and I'll give you the pros/cons i find when i've used Scilab.

• Small community: It's not a common software, for this reason its community is not as big as Matlab community.
• Lack of functions: This is because of the lightweight of the software, it just includes indispensable functions to work.
• Documentation looks old: Scilab has its official docummentation but the page and examples are not very friendly at first sight.

What's next?

The first step to begin with Scilab develop is download it.

Scilab, being Open Source, is very easy to install in any kind of OS accessing from the Scilab download page.

Once you got it installed, you can wath this short overview to Scilab:

Nevertheless, sometimes you don't want to install programs because a lot of reasons, in this case you can use the Scilab Online Version which is mainteined by IITB (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay).

As well as Matlab, Scilab has its own IDE integrated in the instalation, you can use it but we going to implement Scilab execution in the Visual Studio Code Editor, you can download it from the VS Code download page, we'll configure it in following posts.