Suppose you want to know what a certain mathematical function looks like. What do you do? You can probably look up the Handbook of Mathematical Functions if it is a well-know one. If you are comfortable with Fortran or C, you can quickly make a code to generate a plot and use a plotting program to display it. But the quickest and dirtiest way to get a plot is to use a ready-made GUI mathematical tool.
The most well-know tools are Maple and Mathematica. Here I choose to discuss Maple. Maple/Mathematica are in fact more than mathematical plotters. They are capable of computer algebra. That means that they can do symbolic operations such as expansions, integration, and differentiation with symbols and variables. I often use them as an integral table.
Once you familiarise yourself with the language, I'm sure that you will benefit from using them when you work out a physics problem, be it a real-life research problem or a homework problem.