This is based on the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tridiagonal_matrix_algorithm
The entries in the matrix on a particular row are A[i], B[i], and C[i] where i is the row index. B is the main diagonal, and so for an NxN matrix B is length N and all elements are used. So for row 0, the first two values are B[0] and C[0]. And for row N-1, the last two values are A[N-1] and B[N-1]. That means that A[0] is not actually on the matrix and is therefore never used, and same with C[N-1].