This week covers the basics to get you started up with R. The Background Materials lesson contains information about course mechanics and some videos on installing R. The Week 1 videos cover the history of R and S, go over the basic data types in R, and describe the functions for reading and writing data. I recommend that you watch the videos in the listed order, but watching the videos out of order isn't going to ruin the story.

Welcome to Week 2 of R Programming. This week, we take the gloves off, and the lectures cover key topics like control structures and functions. We also introduce the first programming assignment for the course, which is due at the end of the week.

We have now entered the third week of R Programming, which also marks the halfway point. The lectures this week cover loop functions and the debugging tools in R. These aspects of R make R useful for both interactive work and writing longer code, and so they are commonly used in practice.