Learn R by trying R by David Smith.
From the post:
If you are new to R, and want to get an introduction to the R language, in the classic “learning by doing way”, Code school and O’Reilly have put together the Try R interactive tutorial.
This tutorial is a painless introduction to the R programming language. During the course you’ll become familiar with using vectors, matrices, factors, and data frames to manipulate data into powerful visualizations.
How would you translate this concept into a means of teaching topic maps?
As an online and responsive interface?
What would you choose as the domain for the topic map?
Or perhaps better, what trend indicators would you watch so you could pick something of broad current interest?
Would you change it seasonally?