This course will introduce students to the field of data visualization. Students will (1) learn basic visualization design and evaluation principles, (2) be tutored on how to find and download datasets of interests, and (3) develop programming skills to create a good variety of common charts for effective data exploration and visualization. By the end of the semester, students are expected to become educated critiques of data visualization and comfortable programmers who are able to acquire, explore and visualize large datasets. They will also become familiar with the self-learning resources on R to continue to sharpen their skills beyond this course.