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I have the following example: 

\begin{equation} \[ \left \{ \begin{tabular}{cccc} 1 & 5 & 8 & a \\ 0 & 2 & 4 & a \\ 3 & 3 & -8 & a \end{tabular} \right \} \] \end{equation}

It should be a matrix, so I would like to have proper square brackets. I have tried the approach with setting them manually (\Bigg[) but the matrix is going to be larger so it needs to be set automatically. In the code above, I tried to use:

 \[ \left \[

but it didn't work. Any idea what's not working in the previous code?

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    \left[ and \right]. The characters { and } are special, so the must be escaped for getting printed braces, but [ and ] aren't special. However, with the package amsmath you can simply type \begin{bmatrix} 1& 5 & 8 & a \\...\end{bmatrix}. Commented May 18, 2015 at 17:38

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There are many expanding delimiters available in TeX/LaTeX; the main ones are (round) parentheses, (square) brackets and braces. The only problematic ones among them are the braces, because { and } are special characters, used for grouping and for delimiting arguments.

So, \left(...\right), \left[...\right] and \left\{...\right\} are the “automatically expandable versions. The same for the manual \bigl(, \bigl[ and \bigl\{; similarly for \bigr and the other commands in the same family.

The commands \[ and \] mean a totally different thing: they delimit an unnumbered math equation.

So your case should be (with array, not tabular):

\begin{equation} \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 5 & 8 & a \\ 0 & 2 & 4 & a \\ 3 & 3 & -8 & a \end{array} \right] \end{equation}

but upon loading amsmath you have a wealth of better constructions:

\begin{equation} \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 5 & 8 & a \\ 0 & 2 & 4 & a \\ 3 & 3 & -8 & a \end{bmatrix} \end{equation}
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