This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to R programming. Readers gain a solid understanding of the fundamental concepts of R, ranging from basic mathematical operations and variable assignments to more complex data structures like vectors, data frames, and lists. Through hands-on exploration of a real-world dataset covering 120 years of Olympic athletes, the chapter demonstrates how base R functions can be applied to clean, subset, and analyze data to uncover insights into trends such as health, popularity, nationalism, and gender dynamics. Control structures such as conditional statements and loops are explained, with an emphasis on their practical application in R scripts. Finally, to visually represent data, the chapter covers basic plotting techniques using base R graphics, setting the stage for more advanced visualization tools available in the tidyverse.