One of Mathematica's most power features is its extensive online help system. If you've ever seen the massive 1470 page Mathematica Book you know there's a lot of material about how to use it. What you may not know is that entire book is included in the online help that comes with Mathematica!

There are two main ways to access help in Mathematica. The first is from the notebook. Putting a question mark in front of a function will give a short explanation of how to use that function, along with a link to the function's page in the Help Browser.

If you want more information about the function, you can put two question marks in front of the name:

The other way to get help in Mathematica is via the Help Browser. In this online reference you will be able to find almost anything you could possibly need. The Help Browser is quite extensive, offering help in six categories: Built-in Functions, Add-ons, The Mathematica Book, Getting Started/Demos, Other Information, and a Master Index.

The Mathematica Book, as you may have guessed, contains the entire text of The Mathematica Book by Stephen Wolfram. There is a Practical Introduction to Mathematica in the book that should build well on this tutorial.

The Add-ons menu gives help with subroutine packages that come with Mathematica but are not loaded by default.

The Other Information section deals with the menues, notebook formatting, warning messages, and other interface related topics.

The Getting Started/Demos section shows off some of the results you can get from Mathematica's graphical and acoustical functions, as well as the mathematical functions and formulae it knows and works with.

The Built-in Functions section will likely be the most used. For every built-in function, it contains a description of the function, its uses, and any important notes on how Mathematica treats that function when it is making calculations.

Finally, the Master Index is an alphabetical index of everything covered in the other five sections.

One of the really great features of the Help Browser is that it is a collection of notebooks. As such, it is fully interactive. You can add and remove information (be careful, you can destroy the information that comes with the software!) to your heart's content. If you have had trouble figuring out exactly how to use a function, you can leave yourself a note for the next time you want to use it. If you come up with a particuarly nice exampe or result, you can paste it in or type it and have Mathematica evaluate it. In a classroom setting, this means that students can learn from past students' mistakes, provided that they leave meaningful notes to each other, instead of struggling through the same problems over and over again.