How can we harness the power of computing to address problems in biology? How can simulation and modelling illuminate biological phenomena? How can we analyse and visualize data? Through this course, you can begin your journey towards answering these questions. We will use the R programming language to introduce basic programming concepts. In the first half of the course, you will learn how to write programs in R and how to identify and fix errors in them. The course will use examples from biology to motivate many programming features. In the second half of the course, you will see how the R programming environment is convenient for many applications in biology.