[Gretl-users] Overview of nls

Greetings all, In the documentation shown below (from the gretl-guide.pdf), are the regression functions being passed in standard functions? How would I know what function to pass in? My assumption was that I could just pass in the data sets and gretl would give back the parameters used to build the function. nls C = alpha + beta * Y^gamma nls y = alpha + beta * x1 + (1/beta) * x2 Also, it says that if the nonlinear function is a generalization of a linear model, running the ols and passing it's coefficient estimates in as the intial parameters would be more accurate. How do I know if the nonlinear function is a generalization of a linear model? I don't really understand how to use the nls, and the documentation makes some assumptions on the user's level of knowledge. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ryan