Paul Wellin, Sam Kamin, Richard Gaylord. An Introduction to Programming with Mathematica. Edinburgh, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Mathematica is a very large and seemingly complex system. It contains hundreds of functions for performing various tasks in science, mathematics, and engineering, including computing, programming, data analysis, knowledge representation, and visualization of information. In this introductory chapter, we introduce the elementary operations in Mathematica and give a sense of its computational and programming breadth and depth. In addition, we give some basic information that users of Mathematica need to know, such as how to start Mathematica, how to get out of it, how to enter simple inputs and get answers, and finally how to use Mathematica's documentation to get answers to questions about the system.