I've been looking for ways to teach myself to use the R programming language. I'm an engineer with a lot of statistics and data use education. I learned R is a powerful language for statics analysis and big data usage, but did not get any education in it. Since R is free, and I have too much free time, I downloaded the R language and RStudio to write programs in.
While I was looking for exercises and tutorials, I found a 40 video long lecture series that walks you through the functionality of R in a very easy to follow along way. Here's the link to the first video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX532N_XLIs&index=1&list=PLqzoL9-eJTNBDdKgJgJzaQcY6OXmsXAHU
So far, R is very much like MatLab, and shares a lot of functionality with Minitab. If you're interested in learning some basic programming (easier than Java), and want to learn how to use some excellent tools for data analysis, check out R and the video series all for free. The series is top notch and the guy deserves way more traffic!