Choosing an Analysis Tool

I’ve been learning some Octave recently and have refreshing my Python on my summer to-do list for a course I’ll be teaching in the fall, plus I’ve been running into a ton of articles about R (particularly for data visualization) that are making me think I ought to give it a look as well. So this comparison of the three from Slashdot was a nice overview from one person’s experience of which tool to turn to when: R, Octave, and Python: Which Suits Your Analysis Needs?. The comments (as always) offer some interesting input as well, including suggestions for other tools to pair up with these three to get the most out of them. I might head back to this article if I pick any of these tools up seriously for pointers of where else to go with them.