R is great for producing scientific papers, charts, and doing a vast array of "standard" statistical analyses. I have found python to be much nicer because it's more of a "real" programming language, but the numpy/scipy/pandas stack make it very easy to use for data science and financial analysis also.

There's a (very) quick intro here:

http://lectures.quantecon.org/py/pandas.html

You can also look into quantopian for practice, but I don't recommend actually trading money.

https://www.quantopian.com/