I purchased a TI-NSPIRE CX CAS calculator about 2 years ago, along with a white board, and I love it. But while I think it’s a great calculator, I don’t think it’s a good programmers calculator. Yes you can enter hex and binary numbers directly and use all the standard logical operates, but displaying the result as a non-decimal number takes too many key strokes for my liking.
There’s loads of arguments For and Against using calculator in schools and I don‘t want to go into them.
For me it’s about relearning some of the maths I’ve forgotten. But the calculator doesn’t teach me maths, and it doesn’t’ even show me steps I need to perform to solve a problem. But when I am trying to relearn something it does allow me to check if I got it right, or that I’m heading in the right direction. Yes there is a learning curve (its even got a ‘For Dummies Book”), but if you want you use it like a normal calculator and not explore the advance features then yes it’s pretty simple to use.
So for my purpose it’s not a bad choice because in my opinion things like Excel and GNU Octave are great with numbers, but not so good if you’re trying to relearn a maths concept and you have no interest in a numerical result. I have also purchased the new IPAD NSPIRE CAS App but haven’t really played with it yet, but I do like the larger easier to read screen.
I like the Nspire as training aid but I wouldn’t go and try to convince any of the Matlab guys at work that it’s a great engineering tool, but then again that’s not the market it’s aimed at, however that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for some engineering tasks.