With the Quantitative Finance (ECON 405) class that I am taking right now, we are heavily relying on an open source software called “R”. Like many many many open source projects out there, the documentation are written by programmers and not professional documentation writers.

But I stumbled upon this nice little R Tutorial today that covers pretty much everything you need to know to get started with R. I hope all of you who are taking this course now (or in the future) will find this useful.

R is actually a really nice piece of software (and free!). I use R as a really beefy calculator for my day-to-day course work too. Matlab is really nice and powerful, but it just takes too much effort to remote into the terminal server to access the software. If you want to try out the software, you can get a copy of it from their website.