Note: As of June 2007, Mathematica 6.0 has only been out for a month or so.
This document thus describes only earlier versions, but will be
updated once 6.0 is installed on student-accessible computers.
Although the bare graphics it produces can be excellent, labeling them
well from within Mathematica is tedious, and is best left to more
effective tools, such as drawing programs, or TeX-related programs for
generating equation-related labels.
Although it can do sophisticated numerical calculations, Mathematica may be
100 to 1000 times slower than a compiled program written in Fortran or C++.
Be warned!!
Fortunately (at least for C programmers) the MathLink utilities
provide hooks which communicate between Mathematica and external
C programs, and to call C programs from within Mathematica .