  Braidlab is a Matlab package for analyzing data using braids. It was designed
to be fast, so it can be used on relatively large problems. It uses the
object-oriented features of Matlab to provide a class for braids on punctured
disks and a class for equivalence classes of simple closed loops. The growth of
loops under iterated action by braids is used to compute the topological
entropy of braids, as well as for determining the equality of braids. This
guide is a survey of the main capabilities of braidlab, with many examples; the
help messages of the various commands provide more details. Some of the
examples contain novel observations, such as the existence of cycles of the
linear effective action for arbitrary braids.
