the matlab documentation, imo, is the best technical documentation ever written for anything. if your background was more math-heavy then the docs provided easy to understand translation between recognizable mathematical idioms into code (if matlab wasn't already very math-idiomatic).

and back in 2010 or so, python's numerical optimization libraries left a lot to be desired, and totally hopeless compared to matlab. (edit, i don't remember it being nearly as good as octave, which wasn't particularly good either back then).