I'm in the course as well and don't really understand what the fuss about Octave is. The help system is abysmal and third-party library support seems far behind

I'm in the course as well and don't really understand what the fuss about Octave is. The help system is abysmal and third-party library support seems far behind other popular platforms. It's also quite unstable on Windows. I've been playing around with R for the past two weeks and have been more or less happy (with the exception of the memory and speed limitations in the GNU implementation). Nevertheless, this will be a really exciting field for the next decade or so. Amazing possibilities right now!