I've been using it for exactly the same purpose. When I think about how much it would cost me to get the Matlab equivalents I feel like sending the developers some flowers.
Python/Numpy works pretty well for this sort of thing too though, and the graphing features seem a little more sophisticated.
I've always wanted to try Numpy for this purpose, but I get exposed to so much MATLAB code in research papers for DSP that it hardly seems worthwhile.
Furthermore, I've built an entire Objective-C math framework (https://bitbucket.org/liscio/smugmath) that operates very similarly to MATLAB (i.e. vector-oriented) and allows me to easily translate DSP algorithms found in research papers over to shipping products (http://capoapp.com, http://fuzzmeasure.com).
And yeah, since Matlab is pretty much the standard it's a big plus to be able to use code from papers etc directly in Octave. Translating to Numpy is usually straightforward but it's definitely an extra step.
Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding along with your numerical stuff though.
> Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding along with your numerical stuff though.
Once you get used to "cell arrays" and "structs" and "struct arrays", you can do most anything in Octave that you can in Python, but the weirdness of those syntaxes is quite off putting for a lot of coders.
Python/Numpy works pretty well for this sort of thing too though, and the graphing features seem a little more sophisticated.