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Best and easiest way to learn one of MATLAB, R, or Python?

B

badchoice

Junior Member
It appears that the jobs that I'm interested in have preference for people with one of MATLAB, R, or Python experience. I'm thinking long-term so nothing immediate and would like to start gaining skills in one of them. Which one should I aim for? Do community colleges offer any of them?
 
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At least when compared with matlab, Python has the advantage of being completely free and open. You won't need a license, you don't need to buy packages etc.

There are also lots of good online tutorials. Stack Social has a paid one that one of my friends took (they said paying for it motivated them to actually do it)

https://stacksocial.com/sales/pure-python-hacker-bundle-master-python-django-programming

But you can find others that are free also.

Edit: Actually I'm not sure if that python tutorial is directly applicable to finance, so it might be worth hunting down one that is.
 
It looks like you're interested in doing some kind of data analysis. MatLab and R might be good for specific cases, but Python will be a much more general tool that you can do a lot with. The upside of learning Python is that you can use it for anything from little scripts to data analysis to building web applications.

I would learn the basics of python programming, then start playing with iPython (interactive python notebooks) and Pandas (Python data analysis library).

http://ipython.org/
http://pandas.pydata.org/
 
Python is the most flexible of the three, as you'll find in many applications outside of scientific computing/simulation. It's also free, and can be integrated with Visual Studio. Like MATLAB, it also has an extensive library of application specific tools, which are *mostly* free. It's also a pretty good place to learn programming in general.

MATLAB on the other is a very valuable tool, but it's also an expensive one. You can learn most of the language via Octave (a free knock-off), but compatibility may not be guaranteed. That said, if you have the opportunity to learn MATLAB, you definitely should given its prevalence.
 
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