A few pages from an actual lab book (courtesy of N. Belcher)
The university provide license for Matlab but you need to request it. Proceed to W&M Matlab page to request it.
Matlab comes comes with many toolboxes, among them for this class you need
The rest is optional and can be installed later.
Matlab should be installed in every campus computer lab and there is also web based version. But it might be good to have your own.
There is also one page Matlab tutorial for a very quick introduction to Matlab fitting.
If you need a more advance/nonlinear fitting hints. Have a look at fitting introduction materials of Phys-256 class which I taught. You will probably find super useful the fitting chapter from my book “Programming with MATLAB for Scientists: A Beginner’s Introduction” book which is available at amazon and at the CRC Press.
If you are novice Python user, a good start is the web colaboratory interface