Maple is a richly developed symbolic and arbitrary precision mathematics system. Oklahoma State University has a campus-wide license for the use of Maple, which means that it is broadly available in PC labs as well as many Unix systems. Some familiarity with its workings will greatly facilitate any student's or researcher's work in advanced mathematics.
Maple commands can be collected in a program file, just the same as any other programming language. This program file can then be loaded into Maple's interpreter. Alternatively, the graphics interface can store commands in ``worksheets,'' which can include:
There are many written guides to Maple, as well as web resources. The standard manuals that come with Maple are [1,2]. A tutorial handbook also comes with the package, called First leaves, [3]. A very useful site is MIT's support pages for Maple, since it is widely used there.
Rather than keep up with the ever-changing web, we simply refer you to your favorite search engine to find one of extremely many beginner's guides available on the web. We will also give a few tips in this document.