William A. Stein wrote:This is a book about Sage http://sagemath.org, which is a large free open source software project that I started in 2005, whose “mission statement” is to create a viable free open source alternative to the commercial programs Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. I have given many talks, tutorials, and workshops on Sage, and this book records what I have personally found to be the most important key ideas that are needed to make effective use of Sage. My intention is that you read the whole book cover-to-cover, and have thus kept the book intentionally short.

I assume that you have some previous computer programming experience, but not necessarily in Python. Though I’ll make reference to many mathematical topics when illustrating how to use Sage, do not worry if some are not familiar to you.

This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so it will always be freely available in many formats.