ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a fairly rapid review of the basics that one needs to begin working with Maple. Computer languages have very precise rules about what constitutes valid input, which is the syntax of the language. A lot of the syntax revolves around the use of special symbols and I use this in the first section as a key to the main syntax of Maple. There are issues concerning the use of variables that are peculiar to computer algebra systems such as Maple, which I discuss in the second section. Experience of teaching Maple over a number of years has made me aware of a number of very common errors that catch inexperienced users, and I warn the reader about some of these in Section 2.3. Languages for symbolic and algebraic computing normally provide one or more list-like data structures that are nearly as fundamental as the primitive unstructured data types; Maple provides sequences, lists, and sets, which are distinct but closely related, and I discuss their use in Section 2.4. In the last section I introduce the use of literal or textual data. Typically, text plays a secondary role in high-level mathematical computation, but it plays a fundamental role at a lower level and in other application areas, and in fact it is possible to use Maple for quite sophisticated text processing, which is the subject of Chapter 14.
