At the Core Unit for Bioinformatics at the Berlin Institute of Health, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, we have developed a five-day, 5 hour per day crash course running for the last three years. This book is a companion to that course.
This is also the reason for how the materials in the book are arranged. Rather then discussing everything about vectors first, then everything about matrices etc., we start with easy things, and return to them later to build on them. I call this "helical learning" – we spiral around the same topics, but each time going a bit deeper, and each time you will understand a bit more. This is also why some topics are spread between the days – by trial and error, we have found the amount of material that can be covered in a day of learning.
There are two goals of this book. The first one is that after five days of learning R, you will be able to load, inspect, manipulate and save data files (such as Excel tables or CSV files), make some basic plots and perform simple statistical tests. The second goal is that you are in a good starting position to continue learning R on your own.
In other words, this course should give you a jump start, allow to overcome this first hurdle of learning R.