Question

Do I have to buy Matlab to take this course?

Answer 1

The MIT "sc" scholar courses are intended to be self contained. You should not have to buy Matlab.

Answer 2

You could try Scilab, which is open source, and very similar to MATLAB. It even recognises most common MATLAB commands. You should be able to implement most, if not all, MATLAB examples from this class.
http://www.scilab.org/

Answer 3

We use Octave which is a MATLAB clone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave

Answer 4

Not necessarily, but it will help. I would go for Ocatve or R instead which is similar to matlab but free.

Answer 5

i don't think so. coz matlab is not free. i think if you really want use programming language, python should be very helpful. like python.