A friend of mine asked me the other day how she could use the function optim in R to fit data. Of course, there are built-in functions for fitting data in R and I wrote about this earlier. However, she wanted to understand how to do this from scratch using optim.
The function optim provides algorithms for general-purpose optimisations and the documentation is perfectly reasonable, but I remember that it took me a little while to get my head around how to pass data and parameters to optim.