I HATED Maple. The app is great and all but the class I had to take dedicated to the Maple application was ANNOYING. I was in computer science and that course was the worst class ever.
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Apps for Engineering Students
- Thread starter ddrueckhammer
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I HATED Maple. The app is great and all but the class I had to take dedicated to the Maple application was ANNOYING. I was in computer science and that course was the worst class ever.
I'm an engineer (chip designer), and I happen to work at a small shop that uses Macs. Some software I use or have used (that a student would find useful on a Mac):
octave - gnu's answer to matlab. That means it's free, and Free. It's also flawed in the way that many free software projects are. It's ok for filter design if used with the "octave forge" toolkit, but it's not a complete replacement for matlab.
TeX - Nothing does equations like TeX (or LaTeX). And while we engineers often dislike writing documentation, it's fun to write a script that will generate documentation (where appropriate). TeX works great for this, and it takes the aesthetic aspect out of your hands (if you are an engineer, you likely cannot be trusted with tasks requiring aesthetic judgement).
Scripting - It always pays to know a good scripting language as an engineer; be capable of reformatting one file into another with minimal effort. You'll be a far more efficient designer, and you'll spend less time on boring repetitive stuff and more time on what you love--design! Python seems to be the sweet spot these days, beyond that you'd do well to look toward the future with either lisp, ocaml, or haskell.
Diagrams - We seem to have settled on Omnigraffle Pro. I like it.
Basic unix skills - unix is the lingua franca of engineering. I've used unix in one form or another in every job I've held, and before that all through college. Most chip design tools run on unix, some run only on unix. (Some run only on windows, but they are not usually the premier professional tools). But beyond that, unix (which in this case means the bash shell interface) is a remarkably efficient environment for quickly cobbling your tools together for a one time project. For example, linking octave with a chip simulator, or the free openssl library to a simulation or your chip that implements DES or AES encryption. I've done both of those.
Finally, the one tool that has been indispensable throughout my career: Emacs. I've tried many alternatives, but Emacs can do anything I've ever wanted to do with an editor, anything I've ever seen another editor do, and I'm still finding ways to use it more efficiently after over 10 years of continuous use.
-kev
octave - gnu's answer to matlab. That means it's free, and Free. It's also flawed in the way that many free software projects are. It's ok for filter design if used with the "octave forge" toolkit, but it's not a complete replacement for matlab.
TeX - Nothing does equations like TeX (or LaTeX). And while we engineers often dislike writing documentation, it's fun to write a script that will generate documentation (where appropriate). TeX works great for this, and it takes the aesthetic aspect out of your hands (if you are an engineer, you likely cannot be trusted with tasks requiring aesthetic judgement).
Scripting - It always pays to know a good scripting language as an engineer; be capable of reformatting one file into another with minimal effort. You'll be a far more efficient designer, and you'll spend less time on boring repetitive stuff and more time on what you love--design! Python seems to be the sweet spot these days, beyond that you'd do well to look toward the future with either lisp, ocaml, or haskell.
Diagrams - We seem to have settled on Omnigraffle Pro. I like it.
Basic unix skills - unix is the lingua franca of engineering. I've used unix in one form or another in every job I've held, and before that all through college. Most chip design tools run on unix, some run only on unix. (Some run only on windows, but they are not usually the premier professional tools). But beyond that, unix (which in this case means the bash shell interface) is a remarkably efficient environment for quickly cobbling your tools together for a one time project. For example, linking octave with a chip simulator, or the free openssl library to a simulation or your chip that implements DES or AES encryption. I've done both of those.
Finally, the one tool that has been indispensable throughout my career: Emacs. I've tried many alternatives, but Emacs can do anything I've ever wanted to do with an editor, anything I've ever seen another editor do, and I'm still finding ways to use it more efficiently after over 10 years of continuous use.
-kev